Commodification

Joy Harjo’s poem “New Orleans” paints a painted picture of a woman struggling to find the remaining fragments of her culture throughout history and the city where she resides. In her remarks on her memories and stories, Harjo constantly uses images related to progress and analogies involving money and the pursuit of wealth which lead to the ultimate decay of the Creek’s culture and community. Harjo first writes about “a shop with ivory and knives” (13). Perhaps related to a economic analysis…

In an interview with PBS’s Frontline in 1997, the activist Angela Davis discusses at length the issues affecting African-Americans in the United States and the efficacy of black protest as a means of challenging oppressive circumstances. Central to her thesis is the notion that “the black community” is far from as homogenous as the term implies, and that it is therefore inappropriate to universalise the African-American experience. To illustrate this, Davis references the growing divide between…

“’Where are the women?’” This is the central question to Cynthia Enloe’s pioneering book Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, in her endeavour to resituate women and women’s labour (whether domestic, sexual, manual or emotional) in their deserved spot within the centre of both the discipline and day-to-day practice of international politics. Enloe skilfully demonstrates the fundamental role women continue to play in the international arena through a series…

Chinua Achebe 's Things Fall Apart is a novel about the social, and physical struggles that occurred when the white man first arrived on the African continent. There are constant struggles between gender, identity, commodification, and class. Among the men and women in many African tribes that still exist today, there are divergences, which will always remain intact because of the culture and the way in which they are taught to treat each other. The novel is based on a conception of humans as…

For our essay both my study partner and I decided to watch the television drama “Grey’s Anatomy”. The program is set in Seattle Washington at the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital, and is centered around a female doctor named Meredith Grey as well as other staff and doctors working at the hospital. The series Grey’s Anatomy presents an incredibly sensationalized view of modern medicine. With that in mind, many of the issues that the doctors on the series deal with tend to be over the top for…

to be happy. In creating this song, this is a word that often came to mind and I think that’s due to a sort of nostalgia I felt in creating a song out of pure enjoyment and raw feeling, an element I feel is missing in the mass production and commodification of contemporary music. I don’t find fault in the electric means by which this music is produced, but rather why. It doesn’t seem to be out of pure enjoyment or an emotion absent of greed and the desire to profit off of something and this is…

For example, the speaker brings up slavery as the main root of racism. He mentions the commodification of human beings during the African slave trade and how people justified slavery with the inferiorities aspect. Slaves were treated like property. In the our class textbook, it mentions that blacks choices were completely dictated by white ethnocentrism…

The shortage of organs available for transplants and the increase of kidney failure has created an epidemic of patients on dialysis who await a donor. As the current program of unpaid voluntary donors in North America is not adequate, many urge that compensation for organ donation could be a legitimate solution. The demand for a realistic resolution in organ transactions raises concerns on the breach of human integrity. This paper will explore the ethical dilemma of selling organs as commodities…

Karl Marx basis much of his theory of Marxism and capital on the critiques of other theorists and their assumptions. A famous example is Marx’s critique of Adam Smith regarding “primitive” or primary accumulation. Pearleman defines the concept of primitive accumulation as the separating of the people from their means of providing for themselves. He goes further to state that primitive accumulation provided a basis for capitalist development. It firstly severed the ability of the people to…

empathy influenced the proliferation of certain narratives in the media in cases of police brutality. One of the biggest examples of this was the “meme-ification” of Trayvon’s death that was not only incredibly crass, but also reflective of past commodification of Black trauma like minstrel shows. Also, Noble argues that this meme-ification being allowed under the guise of free speech and intellectual property is indicative of the strength this dominant narrative can take hold when political,…