Otherness

Melissa Wong
March 11, 2015
Andrew Forrester
DISC 1313
 Escaping Heartland America
 Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a town of a little less than four thousand people, is where Tracy Lett’s play turned movie August: Osage County is set. Beverly Weston, the patriarch and a heavy alcoholic, has disappeared and eventually commits suicide, leaving behind his psychotic wife, Violet, in the care of a newly hired caretaker, a Native American named Johnna. After their father’s disappearance, Beverly’s adult…

Despite priding itself to be a nation that champions freedom, democratic values, and equality for all, America possesses a deplorable and shameful history in the maltreatment and devaluation of black lives. In Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations, Ta-Nahesi Coates asserts that because “from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities,” reparations are a…

Humanity has long sought safety inside groups with a similar identity. The existence of tribes or clans based on family throughout the history of the world serves a simple benchmark of what an oft-sought community looks like: It looks like me. One of the many segments of history where we see this desire for like-identified communities is in the development and discourse that frames up early structures of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” in the second through fourth centuries. Driven by the idea that…

In her assessment of Gilbert Hernandez’ seminal work, Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories, Jennifer Glaser makes a number of claims about the ultimate meaning behind the work and how it relates to the larger work of transnational authors. Glaser asserts that Palomar is an important piece of transnational exploration; Through the lens of the somewhat mystical town of Palomar,Hernandez explores race, gender, class and the still unfolding effects of cultural imperialism. Glaser also argues that…

Frida Kahlo, one of the most well reputed, thoroughly studied, and widely influential artists today, has been comprehensively misunderstood and exploited since before she had achieved international notoriety. Kahlo’s relationship with the surrealist movement is complicated; André Breton and his fellow surrealists considered Kahlo’s paintings to be archetypal surrealist works due to their outlandish imagery and fantastic themes, yet Kahlo herself rejected the title and even disdained certain…

Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms is a novel based on three generations of Japanese Canadian women: Naoe, Keiko, and Muriel, who are experiencing an identity crisis. Naoe, an elder in the home, is an anguished woman who attempts to come to terms with her immigration to Canada, while Keiko, Naoe’s daughter, struggles to assimilate into the Canadian culture leaving her Japanese heritage behind. Muriel, (Naoe refers to her as Murasaki), is Keiko’s daughter who is born in Canada. Growing up,…

distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as inferior or superior. Racist ideology can become manifest in many aspects of social life. Associated social actions may include xenophobia, otherness, segregation, hierarchical ranking, supremacism, and related social phenomena.…

Edward Said’s Orientalism and his critique of the West has been called both controversial and groundbreaking. In his book, he outlines the different ways the Western world since the beginning of time has “othered” the East and therefore taken advantage of and exploited its peoples and cultures all while serving its own imperialist schema. While I agree with the argument that the West is responsible for a number of injustices against “orient,” namely that the West created a binary division of the…

“Out of the 77 percent of those bullied, 14 percent have a severe or bad reaction to the abuse, according to recent school bullying statistics. These numbers make up the students that experience poor self-esteem, depression, anxiety about going to school and even suicidal thoughts (bullycide) as a result of being bullied by their peers” (Wordpress, 2015). Students, parents and school personnel alike have used the term “bullying” to describe the hostile behavior and interactions that occur…

The animals in a farm named Manor Farm attempt to assert their Otherness in contrast to the oppressive human interference through a Rebellion. The word Rebellion appears with a capital ‘R’, as if the animals have almost found their harmony with deifying the act of Othering. The capitalized ‘Rebellion’ seems a raw simulation of the anthropocentric deity-figure that appears in grand narratives of the religious kind. The Rebellion of Manor Farm turns bloody and resembles in all its subtlety the…