The Fall 2007 edition

Editor’s Note: In November 2007, the evolving cadre of undergraduate students that coalesced in September 2004 to produce Elements, a journal of undergraduate research, released its latest issue. The following brief excerpts are drawn from four of that issue’s feature essays. The full contents can be read at www.bc.edu/elements.

Table of contents

Those rapping basques

The case of Negu Gorriak, a musical group of Basque nationalists who have modeled themselves on politically charged hip-hop icons like Public Enemy, is a prime example of the way in which an explicitly African-American art form has become a relevant means of addressing similar issues of marginalization and injustice in very different cultures. Jacqueline Urla describes the band’s discovery of this music and the inherent value they collectively saw in it, asserting that, “In militant rap and its denouncement of North American race relations, these young Basque radicals found a new and potent language of protest.” Negu Gorriak’s insistence on using only the Basque language in its music is a means of reclaiming their heritage and voice, an effort that they identified with certain black nationalist efforts in the United States. In tribute to this perceived mutual struggle of cultural reclamation, they modify James Brown’s famous chorus in their anthem “Esan Ozeki,” declaring (in their traditional tongue), “Say it loud. I’m Basque and I’m proud!”

By Alex Brady ’07, who teaches eighth grade with Teach for America in the Bronx

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The Olmstead cure

It was in the Back Bay that Frederick Law Olmsted commenced his Boston work, for common belief held that parks were beneficial to a city’s sanitation. Yet parks in general were believed to purify air—in Olmsted’s address to the Lowell Institute, he remarked, “Air is disinfected by sunlight and foliage. Foliage also acts mechanically to purify the air by screening it.” Dubious as this science is, the rhetoric was strong and was a significant motivator behind Boston’s park construction. The park was often described as “lungs for the city.” The medical community in Boston testified to the City Council on behalf of park construction, and the American Medical Association’s Committee on Public Hygiene added, “The necessity for public squares, tastefully ornamented and planted with trees, cannot be too strongly urged upon the public attention, as one of the most powerful correctives to the vitiated air with in the reach of the inhabitants of a populous place.” Miasmatic air from the built environment would pass through parks, be cleansed, and benefit citizens nearby or within the space.

By Jarret Izzo ’07, who is a musician in Boston

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Artificial thinking

Intelligence experts agree that for an [artificial intelligence] to be called a conscious being it must be greater than the sum of its parts—streams of meaningless digital characters. To be self-aware, an A.I. must acknowledge its “I” as an autonomous being, free from the orders its creator had placed on it; it must also match the human consciousness at both the sublime and irrational levels. With irrational imagination, A.I. can envision the infinite possibilities that are beyond its experience and program. If the A.I. is bound by the rationality of its program, then it is trapped in a cage it does not know exists. Imagination and mental freedom are inseparable; if devoid of imagination, then A.I. will be nothing more than a mirror mimicking the world as is and not as the world might be.

By Huy Trinh ’09, a philosophy and history major

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France’s mythic National Front

Beyond Jean-Marie Le Pen’s frequent allusions to Joan of Arc in his speeches (as the woman who “had the courage to say ‘no’ to a foreign invader”), we see, on his website, a poignant illustration of his belief in the unchanging myth of France:

My mother was a small peasant woman, a true salt of this earth person. She started tending cows at the young age of 12, just as all my ancestors from the Morbihan region of Brittany had done since long before the French Revolution.

By pointing to a period “before the French Revolution” and the region of Brittany, Le Pen is pointing to a time and place when his ancestors weren’t French at all—they were actually Bretons. Moreover, the Bretons didn’t even speak French; they spoke their own dialect, which is quite separate from the modem French language. Second, the “French Revolution” which he is effectively snubbing by alluding to an earlier pastoral time, is the very unifying movement that is responsible for his modern idea of what it is to be “French.” In short, he is caught in a paradox—the very thing that allows him to be “French” is the thing he desires to marginalize and avoid. Like much of the [National Front party], he is projecting an ideal, a solution to his modern day insecurities, into the past and deriving from it a mythical and unchanging identity that, historically true or not, affirms his worldview.

By Soren Lagaard ’08, a history and political science major

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Read more by Jarret Izzo