Orientalism

According to German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer “films are the mirror of the prevailing society.” Through films viewers can understand the culture and sentiments of the people during the time of the film’s creation. Film directors study popular trends in their society and have those trends reflected back in their films to gain viewers and economic profit by providing something the audience can relate to. The preservation and study of films allow for the observation of the political…

Setting her novel in a confined location Emma Donoghue opens it up to various interpretations on various grounds. Since it is the story of a young woman who has been locked against her will and is sexually abused at the hands of a man repeatedly one may simplistically view it as a tale of female subjugation and masculine oppression but that would be blatantly disregarding all the other issues simmering beneath the surface that might not be obvious at first sight. By focusing not only on the…

defender of peace and democracy and Russia perceiving itself as the defender of state sovereignty. Alliances created between states continue to associate the self with allies and the other with opponents. This in part is what Said refers to as Orientalism. Where the Orient represents the “other” side, the threatening inferior majority. Thus the west representing the “self,” the superior minority. Then the question must be asked, how does the states view on the Syrian intervention affect the way…

Renaissance theatre was staged in an exceedingly patriarchal and misogynistic society where women were considered beneath men. One only has to look at the words of English Puritan cleric William Whately, who said that a woman during this period should “acknowledge her inferiority” and was to “carry herself as inferior” (Whately). However, there are some works of Renaissance theatre that do subvert these gendered beliefs, such as William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, John Webster’s The…

French scholar and art critic Souren Melikian criticizes the concept of an all-encompassing notion of Islamic art, stating that a European equivalent wouldn’t exist in both the museum and academia (Melikian, 2004). Indeed it would be frowned upon to be a specialist in “Western art” ranging from Greek antiquity to Futurism, yet this case for an “Islamic art” specialist. It is perfectly acceptable to demand from a scholar in “Islamic art” to know about early Islamic Abbasid architecture, and late…

figure in Fringe also expresses to the viewer that the woman has not been destroyed but she is indeed wounded, but she is healing. The image is a visual record of how deep is the cut of the patriarchal mind-set. Belmore is critiquing the history of Orientalism here in a very simple way. The representation of the female nude has been historically linked to the hyper sexualizing of women and male eye candy, meaning that women exist to satisfy patriarchal…

September 11 is a critical day in the American history. The violent hijacks of 9/11 changed America and the world as well politically, socially, and economically. Since the fall of the Twin Towers, America realized that it has to confront a new furious enemy called terrorism. Stacy Suver, a critic of American literature, affirms that the hijacks of September 11defined terrorism in a direct way as a kind of “communication” that intends to deliver a message about power “between the perpetrator of…

In a more elegant manner, Rabih Alameddine wove his novel The Hawakti with rich and diverse background of the whole Middle East. The Hakawati is a novel which illustrates the diverse past of Arabs in the Middle East. This novel speaks back to the dehumanizing approach initiated by Americans, particularly after 9/11. By proposing to tell us a story, Alameddine deconstructs the reader’s expectations, and it is in this manner he/she is made aware of the plurality of interpretations that a single…

several feminist, post-structuralist, and postmodernist scholars, which I will demonstrate below. Presented in the book are four major themes: (1) feminist anthropology and ethnography, (2) writing against culture, (3) rituals and symbols, and (4) orientalism and postcolonialism. In this paper, I will only discuss the first two major themes.Feminist Anthropology, Ethnography, and Writing Against CultureAbu-Lughod is a well-known feminist…

Edgar Allan Poe described himself as a poet, who created a unique technique that he achieved through his writings, which he claims separates him from all the other famous writers in his line of work during his era. We see his personalized technique through his work such as “Ligeia” and many other short stories he has written throughout his life. He mixed in a fantasy based on reality including his signature gothic style that leaves us in confusion to which whether or not the whole story was…