Orientalism

In 1997, a cover of National Review featured President William Jefferson Clinton, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore in yellowface, completed with buck-teeth, squinty eyes, and stereotypical Asian accessories and wardrobe (e.g., a straw “Coolie” hat, a Maoist Red Guard uniform). In 2004, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle featured two Asian-American leads, both of whom played stereotypical Asian roles. The identity of Asian Americans has long been constructed through…

The repercussion of Orientalism brought a series of influences in America. It made racial discrimination against Asian people and this racism resulted in creating biased laws for white people. The interesting part is American people defined races by themselves so that they could make or revise Asian Exclusion Act as they please according to their own interpretation of race. In this way, they tried to keep Asian people from coming to America or take advantage of them as a measure of meeting…

The Struggle of Today’s Arab Youth At a time when the western world and all the freedoms enjoyed in it are a tap or click away; the struggle for Arab youth is an entirely foreign one to previous generations. Arab youth are struggling with a crisis of their learned identity clashing severely with the world they see in mass culture, a free world they desperately want to live in and be a part of. Access to the Internet, technology and the resultant rapidly amplified globalization has made their…

As a result to the eighteenth-century cultural view of women, which definitely influenced Johnson’s approach, Rasselas is full of gender inequalities. When Rasselas and Nekayah, for example, decide to separate to observe the Egyptian private life, and when they are back, Nekayah says that she approaches “the shades of humbler life,” while Rasselas is to observe “the splendor of the courts” (110). Besides, women in the novel are always men’s assistants and not their equal, and their greatest…

Appearing at a moment when the study of modernity has come to challenge the reified separation of text and society, this major work can be read as an engagement with modernity through its impact on the negotiation of an individual identity. I have taken up such concepts as they are represented in the works of the author Junichirō Tanizaki. Through examining two of Tanizaki’s defining novels, Naomi and Some Prefer Nettles, my critical response aims to critically evaluate Tanizaki’s literary…

Introduction and Importance of the Research An investigation into the misuse and misinterpretation of religious terms in the traditional online news media and its effects on people’s attitude towards Islam and Muslim community in UK. The research seeks to investigate the effects of misused language on audience’s perception. It will examine how misinterpreted religious terms, specifically linked to Islam, affect people’s perception of the meaning of Islamic terminology, Islam as a religion and…

Americans call ‘orientalism’ today but generally credit to China and Japanese cultures. The South Asian identity was commodified and Bald addresses several aspects of this such as tea culture and fashion while only briefly mentioning the sex culture that found a home in the South. However, the information was readily available as Priya Srinivasan wrote an article entirely focused on Nautch dancing culture in 2009. Both authors challenged how the average American defined orientalism, where the…

The entire Grounder culture takes aspects from real life cultures while also portraying them as savages. For example, tattoos are important to the Grounder culture, many characters have facial tattoos such as Emroi, introduced later but with a clear Maori tattoo. The Grounders are often portrayed with Tribal tattoos, clearly stolen from a variety of native cultures that use specific designs to create symbolic cultural meaning. Historically, Native people, with me concentrating on the Moari…

Frantz Fanon sought to understand colonization more through minds rather than within the physical world. Living in France, he saw how people (men especially) from Africa acted once they arrived in what he calls the “host country” as compared to how they would act in their homeland. In order to advance their status and to be accepted, black people felt they needed to adopt the cultural standards of the host country. In order to do this, African men would try to emulate what they saw in white…

Inspiration for the Thesis Topic At the middle of this semester, I decided to go back to the point, the Post-Impressionist period, where I started to be interested in Art history in the very beginning. Therefore, I would love to start again with Gustav Klimt, who lived around the same period, but had a distinctively different style in Austria. After talking to Professor Houghteling, I was inspired by the perspective offered by her. Since several well-known works of Gustav Klimt have been…