Speaking of Athletes and Racial Stereotypes:Vincent sent his further analysis of character types in the American wrestling league, and I forgot to post it until now... the file is here... it's quite interesting... the black wrestlers form a group called "Crime Time" and the Japanese wrestler is "sneaky."
And Speaking of Athletes and Racial Stereotypes again:
Read this fascinating news story about the Phoenix Suns basketball team. The U.S. state of Arizona has a long history of racial discrimination (it was the last state to celebrate "Martin Luther King, Jr. Day" for instance). U.S. national immigration policy is kind of a mess... one political party generally favors open immigration and the other party generally favors closed immigration, but the issue is so controversial that they both prefer to do nothing for fear of angering voters. This leads to a lot of illegal or undocumented immigration, and related tensions, and also benefits employers who hire illegal immigrants at sub-minimum wages. (An economic analysis would be that it is difficult to loosen barriers for the flow of capital while simultaneously tightening barriers for the flow of labor.) So anyway, the Arizona legislature decided to solve the problem by giving police more freedom to arrest illegal immigrants. This is a debatable policy in other ways, but the main problem is that it may also allow police and 'Anglo' (white) citizens to categorize all Hispanics in Arizona as 'illegal' when most are legal citizens. So in other words, it may have the effect of turning a legal distinction (citizen vs. non-citizen) into a racial distinction (white and brown). As we know the relationship between Anglo and Hispanic groups in the southwestern U.S. has been tense since the Mexican-American war in the 1840s, and even hundreds of years before that. So it's interesting to see a commercial business like an NBA basketball team take such an oppositional political stance... and I don't think we can discount the fact that most NBA basketball players are black, and may have some sensitivity to the notion of racial discrimination. As one journalist writes, "This kind of political intervention by a sports team is without precedent and now every athlete and every team has an opening to stand up and be heard."
The Chinese-American Experience:
Check out this review of an art exhibit, by a 畫家 using traditional Chinese landscape styles to paint the grandiose landscapes of the western U.S.
Reading for Next Week:
We will also have presentations by Meg/Joy and Sydney/Ting.
Momaday (2702-11 -> biography & excerpt from The Way to Rainy Mountain... you can stop after the first two paragraphs of the epigraph on 2711).
Silko (2784-91 -> biography & "Lullaby")
Harjo (2805-08 -> biography & "Call It Fear")
Erdrich (2828-30 -> biography & "Dear John Wayne")
Alexie (2851-52, 2854-57 -> biography & "Do Not Go Gentle")
172 (Peggy). Analyze the shift in narrative tone/technique between Momaday's Introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain, and the further excerpts you're given. How might this difference indicate his own multiple or complicated relationship to the Kiowa culture? (Pay special attention to shifts in pronoun reference and verb tense.)
173 (Rea). Do you feel there is a contradiction between Momaday's sense of a timeless ethnic/geographic/cultural heritage ("in [my] blood there is something inestimably old and undying" on 2704, "there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal" on 2708, etc.) and his definition elsewhere of Kiowa plains culture as historically contingent ("short-lived... from about 1740... until about 1875"). In other words, how could something be both eternal/continuous/unchanging and historical/contingent/evolving? And do you think Momaday perceives this to be a contradiction?
174 (Ken). Silko's famous novel Ceremony is similar to Momaday's Rainy Mountain, in that it focuses on a young protagonist who tries to reconnect to his aboriginal heritage (and more or less succeeds). "Lullaby" is quite different because it is framed from the perspective of the older generation. Are the metaphors of the blanket and the woman who becomes mother to her husband just purely bleak/tragic (maybe similar to Zitkala Sa), or is there some element of possible redemption here, as in Rainy Mountain and Ceremony?
175 (Sharon). Analyze the manipulation of pacing/timing in "Call it Fear." What words receive stronger emphasis, and how does Harjo do it? What different meanings could "backwards" have?
176 (Letitia). Explain how "Dear John Wayne" uses metaphors that point in several directions at once (e.g. "horde," "cloud," "film," cancerous division) to define the 'Cowboys vs. Indians' movie myth as a general tendency of American civilization. Compare Erdrich to Baraka, Cisneros, or another author we've read who finds U.S. mass-media popular culture to be a sort of ideological trap.
177 (Emma). Alexie's writing strongly differs from that of the so-called 'Native American Renaissance' that began with Momaday and Silko. Use "Do Not Go Gentle" to sketch some of these points of contrast. And what do you think Baldwin would say about Alexie's metaphor of the "Chocolate Thunder" 按摩棒?
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ReplyDeleteGisele & LeBron looks more like "Beauty and the Beast" to me...
ReplyDelete(Oops! Did I just accidentally refer racism to Disney?? LOL!!!)
Back to work on the paper...
My thought was "King Kong." What I find interesting is her green dress. I don't think she's American, but it links her somehow to the Statue of Liberty, and to the Daisy character in "Great Gatsby." And to the color of American dollars.
ReplyDeleteThis is Peggy’s answer for question 172:
ReplyDeleteIn the introduction part, Momaday used pronoun “I,” “you,” and “they” to talk about Kiowa. He used both present tense and past tense. In this way, it made me feel that the narrator belonged to this group. He is inside the culture of Kiowa. And using “you” and “I” at the same time made readers more closed to the speaker. Yet, in other excerpts, Momaday used “it” to talk about Kiowa’s myth. Compared to previous introduction, it is more unfamiliar. There is no closed relationship between narrator and story itself. I think Momaday used this way to talk about the alienation between Kiowa’s people and their culture. Leaving from their traditional tribal life, Kiowa’s culture like myths or legends became “past” and not “present.” They are Kiowa but there seem to be a distance between its tradition and them.
Here’s Rea answering Q173.
ReplyDeleteI think this contradiction dose exist. Kiowa plains culture is very old and rich of cultural heritage; they have their own myths just like other ancient cultures in the world. However, the Plain culture doesn’t turn into a mature nomadic culture until about 1700s when they start to feed horses. According to Aaron’s question post, Momaday defines this culture as “short-lived... from about 1740... until about 1875.” Based on the timeline, the “short lived” might referred to as “die soon after mature.” Another reason I’m considering is that the records may started around 1740 and the culture gradually died out from about 1875. The Kiowa culture started early, but took much time to evolve. If we see it as a culture from the beginning, the core value would be eternal and unchanging. But if we examine it from when it’s mature, it would be described as historical and contingent because it dose not last very long after maturity. As for Momaday, I think he is conscious, or he wouldn’t make the definition that is somehow confusing.
1.Smock screen and Mosquitoes
ReplyDeleteThe audiences can’t vanquish the mosquitoes which break through the smoke screen for blood, just like Indian culture can’t protect itself from American culture’s attack. American values are like the mosquitoes. They penetrate through the ‘screen’ (movie screen) to distain the native Indians.(audiences) She uses ‘hordes’ to describe the mosquitoes implying that the cowboys sometimes are similar to the hordes. They chase Indians and take resource.
2.John’s big face on screen
In the forth stanza, John’s face is full of the screen and moves to the audiences. This means that the dominant American value is very aggressive, prevailing and oppressing.
3.The cancer
In the movie, John Wayre who represents the American dominant values says : Everything we see belongs to us. In last stanza, the author tells us that John is died because of cancer. At last, his cells belong to the cancer disease. She wants to convey that people who take every thing will be self destruction one day. The American values are going to get cancer, and destructed.
I feel that Endrich’s minority identity is not as vivid and strong as Cisneros. Endrich ‘work for me is like a introspection American value, while Cisneros’s works is more similar to early native Indian writer’s, which embody the life and thought of minority groups.
Obviously, “backwards” and “edge” receive stronger emphasis. By repetition and backspace, Harjo makes these words distinct and further gives them some metaphorical meanings. Taking “backwards” for example, the backward-arrangement itself within the stanzas depicts an image of ‘cliff.’ This backward-arrangement layout makes the poem look like a cliff if only seen by appearance due to irregular angles (the place where sentences stop). Here I think the word "backwards" not only means backwards literally, but also echoes with the word “edge,” pointing some circumstances that being pushed, backwards, to an edge of a cliff, finding nowhere else to retreat.
ReplyDelete