Orientalism

There are different meanings about the meaning of the Western World. Western civilization was born thousands of years ago with the rise of the Greek city-state, influenced by Middle Eastern culture. EAST East (Latin orens, oriri participle: appear birth) is the name of the direction from which the sun (and other stars) minted in antiquity, namely the East rises. By extension, it refers to those regions that are east of the benchmark. In the "Western" culture he was given this name to Asia.…

The 1923 silent movie, East and West, is a great depiction of how customs and life in general differed in the traditional polish town, compared to the more westernized American family and the capital Vienna. Throughout the movie, the viewer can make distinction of how different East and West are portrayed; by their looks and even the very different values, that each of the worlds has, as well as how coming in contact with the West affects the East. In East and West there is a clear distinction…

Vision and Sound: Polyphony in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red and Vaikom Muhammed Basheer’s Walls The term polyphony, meaning multiple voices, has its origin in Western music. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian thinker has adopted the term polyphony to explain the nature of Dostoevsky’s novels. In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin says that Dostoevsky makes his characters free from his control and allows them to have their own voices. In the same work, Bakhtin later says that…

In today’s presentation, David and Laura spoke about the themes of xenophobia and imperialism explored in the book of short stories “The Elephant Vanishes” written by Haruki Murakami. I thought it was incredibly interesting the way that they tied back the protagonists and their vulnerability, lack of agency, and isolation to Japan and what it went through as a culture leading up to World War II. They also spoke of Japanese culture and whether or not these stories served as a commentary about…

In the 7th grade Eastern World history book Eastern World it highlights and outlines the eastern part of the world that many students have not really been introduced to, especially in middle school. The text covers geography as the basic starting point, then from there it dives into the many cultures that are represented in Africa, Asia, and Australia. The key in each chapter and sub-section is to develop intelligence on the perspective of these locations and to ignite the minds of readers about…

When one looks at the pages of history, it is hard to do so outside the bias of one’s own time and cultural heritage. Due to the preponderance of Western society’s influence in the modern world, it is then unsurprising that the East’s dominance on the world’s stage for much of recorded history is overshadowed by the (relatively recent) European/Anglo dominance. Asia is a complex, rich, and multifaceted region to explore, and is especially enlightening to examine in the time leading up to the…

She starts by revealing the fact of how women are shown how they are meant to look from youth, thus forming an ideal image of beauty within one’s head. “The Western man uses images and spotlights to freeze female beauty within an idealized childhood, and forces women to perceive aging—that normal unfolding of years—as a shameful devaluation” (255). Moreover, the author supports her thesis by enlightening how an Eastern woman can elude her quandary since it is evident to society, whereas in…

Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness. There are however problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness, for instance: otherness includes doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every other , every different than and excluded by is dialectically created and includes the values and meaning of the colonizing culture even as it rejects its power to define; the western concept of the oriental is based, as Abdul Jan Mohamed argues, on the…

Imagine being a woman in the Middle East. Getting married before you even hit puberty, having to wear a veil, being severely punished for little things, and being a slave to your home. The mistreatment of women in the Middle East has been going on for a very long time in countries all over the Middle East. From the Jirga and the ba’ad to the misuse of the veil, middle eastern women have constantly been oppressed by the patriarchal government in place in many countries in the Middle East. As the…

In a world becoming increasingly saturated in media, the narratives of many different cultures are spreading throughout the world, and have a greater influence as people across the globe have access to these narratives. What happens, though, when the stories the world knows about a culture are told exclusively through the eyes of foreigners? Can an outsider really know enough about another culture to tell a complex, realistic narrative about the people they are trying to represent? Too often,…