Otherness

A young girl named Sarah Bartman crossed the ocean from her home in South Africa to Europe, unknowingly about her future as the Hot en Tot Venus. The Hot en Tot Venus would become a pin point towards understanding the hyper sexuality of the black female body. In the documentary Sarah Bartman, one of the reasons there was such a fascination with her is because scholarly work had described the African people of a different species. The Black female bodied landed on the boundaries between…

American philosopher and Harvard psychologist William James once said that the very core of religion is experience and emotion—all else revolves around experience. In his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, he defines religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (James 38). Experience plays a key role in the understanding of…

The female quest for autonomy is not uncommon in literature, and Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is no exception. Throughout her novel, Cisneros connects each of her female characters to a Mexican or Chicana historical figure and then works to recreate that character, to pull her from the patriarchal structure in which all women live. The historical characters of Chicana and Mexican history include La Llorona, La Malinche, and the Virgin of Guadalupe, each representing…

than not, it undermines reality and leaves out the very direness of the situation. “A Small Place” is recognized as an anti-travel narrative by provoking readers to acknowledge colonialism and its effects but more importantly, by addressing the Otherness of Antiguans inhabitants and reversing the picturesque gaze that is very much promoted in travel narratives. Colonialism…

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s metaphor of solitude to describe Latin America’s relationship with the rest of the world was very relevant in 1982, when he presented his Nobel Prize lecture. Today however, Latin America is diverging from this so-called “fate” and proving itself to be an emerging relevant power in the world. Despite gravitating away from Marquez’s metaphor of solitude, this is exactly what Marquez predicted within his lecture speech. This essay will explore how Latin America was, from…

Paris suburbs have faced an influx of immigration since 1990s. Undergoing the modernization trend and economic crisis of Paris, the banlieues became isolated both objectively and subjectively from the main society. Problematic issues as result were accumulated emerging in between suburban French youth and the society. It was an appeal to hope for restoring the status quo bias, and a call to action for causing social concern. In order to criticises the injustice of racial and social, La Haine, a…

Latina/o identities: Social Diversity and U.S Politics was quite an interesting reading assignment. It challenged the practices of the wrong contraction of monolithic and singular identity in the U.S. Latina/os. This was accomplished in a number of ways. The theoretical approach on social group identities such as racial, ethnic and gender identities. As well as an approach on the historical mistakes on the diversity and complexity of the U.S. Latina/o Population. While also focusing on the…

The Arne-Thompson-Uther folk tale classification system lists Type 500 stories as "name of the helper tales". These tales often feature a spinner who becomes indebted to a dwarf for assistance rendered. The most famous Type 500 story is the version of Rumpelstiltskin published in the Grimm Brother's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, which saw seven different editions published from 1812 to 1857. While the Grimm's Rumpelstiltskin is the most known version of the tale, an examination of stories published…

Introduction to media and cultural study – assignment 2 Lam Lok Yin 23rd October 2014 Social campaigns are cultural texts which produce and challenge established meanings, values, identities, practices, and social structures like the ways of knowing, seeing, and being, and what could say. The purpose of this essay is to identify and analyse the discourse that are central to a social campaign and discuss the socio-political effects the campaign produces. This essay will be analysing a social…

William Faulkner constructs “A Rose for Emily” in a manner that follows the traditional ideals and behavior of the small-town American South and formally imitates the back and forth way one tells a story. The first section of the short story begins toward the chronological end of the story, as it starts with Miss Emily’s death and then works its way backward in a way that mimics the thought processes of the townsfolk. The first sentence includes the pronoun “our,” which indicates that the…