Liminality

In his historical novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts the immense struggles and sorrows of a young woman, Hester Prynne, during her life as a social exile from 17th century Boston’s rigid Puritanical theocracy. Despite the perpetual discrimination that Hester’s receives from the Puritans as a result of her adulterous sins, Hawthorne seemingly sympathizes with Hester throughout the course of the story by intentionally elucidating a number of hypocrisies and shortcomings that…

Boesman and Lena The stage play ‘Boesman and Lena’ is a play set in 1983 written by playwright Athol Fugard. Athol Fugard centres the play on three characters from the Eastern Cape, Boesman, Lena and Outa. The play depicts the aftermath of the forced removals during the Apartheid Era and the results for many in real life at the time. This play also channels many concepts, including that of absurdity. Other themes of identity, displacement and alienation can be seen in the play too. This essay…

No Angel: A Video Analysis Arguably one of the best records on the eminently successful self-titled Beyonce album, the visual for No Angel highlights some of the key factors within this course that allow us to dissect the sophistication of Beyonce as not only a performer, but one of the most successful black females in American culture. No Angel is an intermission within the entire album - which predominately embodies themes of feminism and black sexuality, as well more inconspicuously racism…

He is making an assertive commentary about the divide between the cultures by his term “outas” (II. 1) because they are considered to be coloured people in the poem. Coloured people experience a state of liminality because they occupy a marginal borderline of being neither black or white. Beyond that, Opperman is trying to give a voice to both the oppressor and the oppressed by making use of both Afrikaans and English, and making reference to a “brown” child…

The Medieval Magic of Love In Gottfried Von Strassburg’s, Tristan, the paradoxical nature of love is established when we’re told that prudency inspires Queen Isolde to brew “a love drink so subtly devised and prepared, and endowed with such powers, that with whomever any man drank it…[t]hey would share one death and one life, one sorrow and one joy” (192). Using oxymorons Gottfried is able to show that love creates contradictory conditions that are difficult to resolve. Appearing almost magical…

juxtaposition of radically exclusive identity elements of which an exemplar would be Maria’s family oriented farm-girl reverie pitted against the strong woman of adventure she symbolizes. Dash (2002) isolates processes of ‘metizaje, creolization and liminality’ in…

Charles Camp and Timothy Lloyd explain in their 1980 paper “Six Reasons to Not Produce Folklife Festivals” that they want “to encourage folklorists...to think more deeply and more critically about festivals” (67). The goal of the majority of folklife festivals is to promote greater awareness among the general population about several cultures’ traditional practices, beliefs, and material items which in turn provides that culture with validation for those beliefs and practices. The festivals’…

Judith Butler makes the argument in her most influential book, “Gender Trouble,” that gender is a performance; it's what the gender does at particular times, rather than universal standards of gender. The distinction between the two is what creates an idea or perception of gender. According to Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble”: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (33).…

Although “humans” have an innate desire to progress and evolve, the concept of humanity is being challenged by rapidly advancing technology due to the fear of becoming a post human society. However, it can be noted that rather than technology making future generations less human, it executes the contrary by illuminating the feature that defines it: the connections made to each other and the universe. By utilizing technology as a catalyst for progressive change, humans have advanced and developed…

the body language that I spoke of, with Hilary performing feminine citeational acts and Trump performing masculine citeational acts. This causes a different effect on the audience. Hilary’s clashing acts again put her in the middle territory of liminality, but also makes her seem a leader and again connects her with motherhood in attempt to appease those uncomfortable with broken gender roles. On the contrary, Trump furthers his connection to manhood with both citeational acts. This tactic…