Orientalism

The Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, are known for the utmost devotion expressed by their fans, especially in the form of hysterical screaming that they provoked in large crowds of teenagers. The article, “Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles” discusses how the incorporation of Indian culture may have contributed to what is known as “Beatlemania”. Their music quickly became a staple for the drug scene, as the Eastern elements conveyed a sense of trippiness. This…

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, was first written in 1988 and his work was inspired and he was influenced by Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly and it is based on a true story. David Henry Hwang as a first generation Chinese American being born in California on August 11, 1975, the writer of the three-act play M. Butterfly was a son of Chinese immigrants, his father was from Shanghai and his mother was an ethnic Chinese from the Philippines. His father immigrated to Oregon during the…

I am a rising senior in high school at Oxford Academy in Cypress, California. I am the Community Outreach Director at Our Climate Story, a non-profit dedicated to sharing the human impact of climate change, where I organize workshops, partnerships, and media. I also coordinate a Take Back the Tap campaign on my campus with the Food and Water Watch, where I utilize skills such as canvassing, event planning, and power mapping to construct a campaign. I also have experience with grant writing as…

The founder of orientalism, Edward Said, states, “nations are narratives”, emphasizing that nations produce their beliefs and values through their widespread dialogue. Furthermore, each civilization has its own story, its own past and present, its own distinctions that make it unique. One might argue, that Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations argument is based off of racism, western bias, and white supremacy; moreover, another form of xenophobia and reasoning for quarrelling conflicts. Due…

Over the course of this semester we have looked at several ethnic groups and their adversities. Although we have seen them separately that is not to say that their challenges have solely affected them as a single group. In actuality we have seen similarities in the ways that the oppressed are marginalized, across both time and space. This ushers in the notion that races are relational to each other, these groups although seemingly having different histories can actually show more resemblances…

artists of color struggle to get their works into museums, completely unrelated to their quality of work. Usually the works of art that are put up are the ones that are stereotypical; the savagely barbaric African art or the ethnically fetishized Orientalism. The works of art and the ethics that museums perpetuate only prolongs this intolerance as museums are a reflection of culture and society. Kymberly Pinder speaks about this subject in her book, Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in…

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of the most influential public figures in 18th-century Vienna. His impact on the public is evident in two of his most influential works — an opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and an instrumental piece, Violin Concert No. 5. Mozart used musical exoticism in these works to create a stereotype of Turks as violent and out of control and juxtapose it against Western European ideals of rationality and restraint. In The Abduction from the Seraglio, Mozart paints a…

is Linda Low, the picture of Asian American whiteness, and on the other end of the spectrum is Mei Li who embodies Chinese tradition. Their differences are displayed throughout the movie through songs, dress, and their actions. Klein’s Cold War Orientalism essay asks the question, “why privilege a character that highlights foreignness over one that emphasizes assimilation (239).” She then states her analysis that these two characters represent the two poles of the stereotypical Asian…

Physical Acts of Power Hollywood films often portray various American ideologies that can be seen through the nation, empire, and domesticity. These ideologies can be considered to be representations of the history of the United States or the current state. Through the examination of Andrea Smith’s “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” Clyde Woods’ “Les Miserables of New Orleans,” Dylan Rodriguez’s “Forced Passages,” and the film Glory, it is clear that the state maintains power…

The TV impacts the general population enormously; it influences their demeanors and conduct, and influences their psyches and accepts. The media faculty exploit this point the western individuals are unmindful about anything that identifies with Arabs and they simply know them from motion pictures and TV shows, and they for the most part are in the picture of fear based oppressor so they take of this point and speak to Arabs and Arab women’s (ladies) without concentrating on them or…