...James Cameron’s movie Avatar was a major discussion amongst my friends when it came out. All of them had seen it at midnight opening, while I was stuck home doing errands and work. For weeks they would talk about how amazing the scenery was and how epic the fights were between the Na’vi and humans. I was completely lost during each discussion we had when we hung out at Starbucks or each other’s houses. I hated not knowing what the movie was about and finally I decided to watch it online. Now I know the reason why people thought it was awesome. I was just like every other viewer who thought the scenery was breathtaking and the story was amazing. Although I have seen Avatar about a hundred times now, I never once thought there were hidden messages occurring behind the movie. I had to watch it again so I could see why people seemed to view Avatar as being an environmental or political issue. The movie seems able to predict how our future will turn out, a type of religion being practiced, and show us acts of imperialism being displayed throughout the story. I was so distracted by the technology used to create Avatar’s scenery; and how amazing the creatures and characters looked that I never once noticed how it could be possibly be allegory of our own world. The movie seems to predict that our future will become miserable. That we will gradually fall short of supplies and that Earth will end up dying. So far this seems to be true because the earth is already fighting back for...
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...healthy community all share similar values and experiences which define how they belong within that community. These shared experiences, values, goals and aspirations, provide a basis for an individual’s self perception. Without them, communities cannot thrive as a whole, and therefore a sense of belonging, self worth and individuality cannot be achieved. This can be seen throughout history, in historical attitudes relating to colonialism, war and equal rights, where conflicting values have seen the degradation and destruction of once strong communities. James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster film, Avatar, privileges the importance of having...
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...Avatar as an Allegory HUM3321-14 Sean Gilman Avatar as an Allegory HUM3321-14 Sean Gilman Sean Gilman Jeffrey Bennett HUM3321-14 13 December 2011 Avatar as an Allegory In the 1600s and 1700s, the British began to migrate to and colonize “The New World”, America. As they arrived, they met a society for whom they displayed little compassion and much hostility. The British invaded their land and oppressed the Native American people for hundreds of years due to their cultural differences and lack of understanding. James Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar mirrors the discovery of the new world, albeit in a very different light. The American military colonizes and destroys land on Pandora, while showing no regard for the welfare of the Na’vi. Avatar serves as an allegory for warfare and cultural hatred based on ignorance and a lack of multi-cultural acceptance and understanding. The Na’vi society of Pandora is an extremely naturalistic people. The Na’vi are the dominant species of Pandora, much like humans on Earth. They are a humanoid species that very much believes in the spirituality of nature and the world around them. In Na’vi society, there are marriage parallels, and they believe in an all-knowing God figure. This is itself, is a very strong correlation to the Native American cultures of early North America. Many of those cultures had similar beliefs. A lot of these Native American cultures believed in a strong connection between the physical world and the spiritual...
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...Omri Flaisher 2-10-2012 Political Undertones in The Human Centipede In general, film and media (more specifically, independent film and media) tend to revolve around a central theme of political and social undertones, which in turn create consumer value and worth. However, many times these undertones are not consciously processed and retained. This may be due to the fact that many do not approach such activities with eyes open to such undertones, or perhaps it is merely due to the depth of the given undertones themselves. Regardless, a lack of awareness does not correlate to a lack of existence. Whether it’s the institution of imperialism in Avatar, or the relation of the later Star Wars films to the U.S. wars in the Middle East, political and social slant remains a driving factor for producers, as it allows those very producers to preach their personal views through their work. While it may be easy to write many movies off as purely visual stimulation, many times it takes a keen eye to delve further into the reason the movie was made in the first place. This supposition can be pulled into play in the case of The Human Centipede, a graphic independent horror film written by Dutch filmmaker Tom Six. Despite the general presumption that the movie was produced for shock value and shock value alone, a deeper look into setting, themes, and casting reveals a film that holds much greater social value than recognized by most. The movie begins chronicling the ventures of two...
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...theory? a. Single people b. Aryan invasion theory- the Vedas believed to be the religious writings of this invading people c. Entering new lands, these people were thought to have carried their language and religion with them. Scholars initially believed that in India the outsiders imposed their social order quickly and violently on the older culture. 5. What is the Aryan immigration theory? a. There were repeated waves of migrations into Pakistan and northern India and that from these contacts between foreign and indigenous cultures the religion of the Vedas emerged 6. What are the objections to both of these theories? a. Scholars view any theory that assumes influence from outside India to be a continued relic of Western cultural imperialism Archeological, linguistic, and genetic investigations continue to offer more clues, but their interpretation has not resolved the issue 7. What are the specific areas of interest or concern for the gods Indra, Agni, Ushas, Rudra, Varuna, Vishnu, Surya, Soma and Yama? a. Indra i. God of storm and war, received great attention because of the strength his worshipers hoped to receive from him b. Agni i. God of fire, carried sacrifices up to the world of the gods c. Ushas i. Dawn and renewal were in charge of this goddess, one of the few female deities d. Rudra i. Brought winds e. Varuna i. God of the sky and justice f. Vishnu i. God of cosmic order g. Surya i. Major sun god h. Soma i. Thought to cause altered states of mind...
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...Maoism ideology: Maoism is a form of communism developed by Mao Tse Tung. It is a doctrine to capture State power through a combination of armed insurgency, mass mobilization and strategic alliances. Propaganda and disinformation against State institutions are used as additional tools. Mao called this process, the ‘Protracted Peoples War’. The central theme of Maoist ideology is resorting to violence as a tool to capture State power. ‘Bearing of arms is non-negotiable’ as per the Maoist insurgency doctrine. Maoism has a definite view about how to get to socialism, and about what needs to be done to meet the basic needs of everyone in a poor country. Development is to be on an egalitarian basis—we are all in it together and everyone rises together. Unlike the earlier forms of Marxism-Leninism in which the urban proletariat was seen as the main source of revolution, and the countryside was largely ignored, Mao focused on the peasantry as a revolutionary force which, he said, could be mobilized by a Communist Party with their knowledge and leadership. The model for this was of course the Chinese Communist rural insurgency of the 1920s and 1930s, which eventually brought the Communist Party of China to power. Furthermore, unlike other forms of Marxism-Leninism in which large-scale industrial development were seen as a positive force, Maoism made all-round rural development the priority. Mao felt that this strategy made sense during the early stages of socialism in a country in which...
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...(c) Bedford/St. Martin's bedfordstmartins.com 1-457-62096-0 / 978-1-457-62096-6 SOUNDS AND IMAGES Movies and the Impact of Images 187 Early Technology and the Evolution of Movies 192 The Rise of the Hollywood Studio System 195 The Studio System’s Golden Age 205 The Transformation of the Studio System 209 The Economics of the Movie Business 215 Popular Movies and Democracy In every generation, a film is made that changes the movie industry. In 1941, that film was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Welles produced, directed, wrote, and starred in the movie at age twenty-five, playing a newspaper magnate from a young man to old age. While the movie was not a commercial success initially (powerful newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose life was the inspiration for the movie, tried to suppress it), it was critically praised for its acting, story, and directing. Citizen Kane’s dramatic camera angles, striking film noir–style lighting, nonlinear storytelling, montages, and long deep-focus shots were considered technically innovative for the era. Over time, Citizen Kane became revered as a masterpiece, and in 1997 the American Film Institute named it the Greatest American Movie of All Time. “Citizen Kane is more than a great movie; it is a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote.1 CHAPTER 6 ○ MOVIES 185 (c) Bedford/St. Martin's bedfordstmartins.com 1-457-62096-0 / 978-1-457-62096-6 MOVIES A generation later...
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...THE BOOK OF TEA by Kakuzo Okakura Originally published Dreamsmyth edition First printing Typography, book design and binding by William Adams Printed in the U.S.A. The Book of Tea . . . . . . . The Cup of Humanity The Schools of Tea Taoism and Zennism The Tea-Room Art Appreciation Flowers Tea-Masters Colophon The Book of Tea . The Cup of Humanity T and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of æstheticism—Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere æstheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe....
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...The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913 Rabindranath Tagore Tagore and His India by Amartya Sen* Voice of Bengal Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of eighty, is a towering figure in the millennium-old literature of Bengal. Anyone who becomes familiar with this large and flourishing tradition will be impressed by the power of Tagore's presence in Bangladesh and in India. His poetry as well as his novels, short stories, and essays are very widely read, and the songs he composed reverberate around the eastern part of India and throughout In contrast, in the rest of the world, especially in Europe and America, the excitement that Tagore's writings created in the early years of the twentieth century has largely vanished. The enthusiasm with which his work was once greeted was quite remarkable. Gitanjali, a selection of his poetry for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London in March of that year, and had been reprinted ten times by November, when the award was announced. But he is not much read now in the West, and already by 1937, Graham Greene was able to say: "As for Rabindranath Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously." The Mystic The contrast between Tagore's commanding presence in Bengali literature and culture, and his near-total eclipse in the rest of the world, is perhaps less interesting than the distinction between the view of Tagore...
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...International Journal of Communication 6 (2012), 2609–2627 1932–8036/20120005 Mapping the Nation and Security in Global Space: A Comparative Study of Danish, Egyptian, and U.S. Action-Adventure Fans KARIN GWINN WILKINS1 University of Texas at Austin This article explores how being an action-adventure fan resonates with articulations of national identity, attitudes toward other nations, and fear of global terrorism in the United States, Denmark, and Egypt. Action-adventure film relies on global Hollywood production, yet the reception of this genre works quite differently in the cultural contexts of communities and affinities of fans. Being an action-adventure fan appears to bear a close relationship with a tendency to exhibit fear of global terrorism and to conceptualize Americans as heroes, particularly among U.S. audiences. Danish and U.S. fans seem more likely to want to cast Egyptian characters as villains than their non-fan counterparts, whereas Egyptian fans prefer Danish characters to be villains. Limited characterizations in this genre inspire and reinforce the imagined scenarios of fans in which American heroes are justified in crucifying foreign villains. Keywords: action-adventure, political attitudes, United States, Denmark, Egypt This work explores how action-adventure fans based in Egypt, the United States, and Denmark map their own and others’ nations and fear of terrorism through their engagement with action-adventure film. Research on the potential...
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...postmodern vengeful return of positivism.” This essay first started as an answer to what I deemed very problematic, i.e. the disputation which I found in bad faith (un-authentic to use a philosophical term or an existentialist term), of the mediatic, dashing Harvard cognitivist/linguist, Steven Pinker, in his article “Neglected novelists, embattled English professors, tenure-less historians, and other struggling denizens of the Humanities, Science is not your Enemy—a plea for an intellectual truce,” (The New Republic--August 19). Then the counter-arguments against Steven Pinker’s conception of the “human animal” developed into an essay arguing that the New Positivism, not science, or technology per say, was the enemy of humanism and its avatars as such. The point is not to become a postmodern anti-scientific Luddite. Genomics are changing the world in ways we barely imagine yet and will re-define what it means to be human (a becoming already imagined by science fiction writers, social critics and critical thinkers such as the feminist Donna Haraway with her “Cyborg”). The point is also not to turn “anti-brainiac.” Without a brain we would become vegetative, a vegetal…, i.e. a purely “natural body,” a “zombie.” If we make use of this “computer” allegory which is an analog but not a homologue, and which is used ad nauseam used by psycho-biologists, without a hard-drive there is no software. But is this a reason to say that the software is but the direct emanation/product/reproduction...
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...Th e T yranny of Gui lt • Pa s c a l B ru c k n e r Translated from the French by s t ev e n r e n da l l The tyranny of Guilt An Essay on Western Masochism • P r i n c e t o n u n i v e r si t y P r e s s Princeton and Oxford english translation copyright © 2010 by Princeton university Press First published as La tyrannie de la pénitence: essai sur le masochisme occidental by Pascal Bruckner, copyright © 2006 by Grasset & Fasquelle Published by Princeton university Press, 41 William street, Princeton, new Jersey 08540 in the united kingdom: Princeton university Press, 6 oxford street, Woodstock, oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu all rights reserved library of congress cataloging-in-Publication data Bruckner, Pascal. [tyrannie de la pénitence. english] The tyranny of guilt: an essay on Western masochism / Pascal Bruckner; translated from the French by steven rendall. p. cm. includes index. isBn 978-0-691-14376-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. civilization, Western— 20th century. 2. civilization, Western—21st century. 3. international relations—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Western countries—Foreign relations. 5. Western countries—intellectual life. 6. Guilt 7. self-hate (Psychology) 8. World politics. i. title. CB245.B7613 2010 909’.09821--dc22 2009032666 British library cataloging-in-Publication data is available cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre d’un programme d’aide à la publication, bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des affaires étrangères et du service...
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...The Story of the Fourth of July The Declaration of Independence We celebrate American Independence Day on the Fourth of July every year. We think of July 4, 1776, as a day that represents the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America as an independent nation. But July 4, 1776 wasn't the day that the Continental Congress decided to declare independence (they did that on July 2, 1776). It wasn’t the day we started the American Revolution either (that had happened back in April 1775). And it wasn't the day Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence (that was in June 1776). Or the date on which the Declaration was delivered to Great Britain (that didn't happen until November 1776). Or the date it was signed (that was August 2, 1776). So what did happen on July 4, 1776? The Continental Congress approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. They'd been working on it for a couple of days after the draft was submitted on July 2nd and finally agreed on all of the edits and changes. July 4, 1776, became the date that was included on the Declaration of Independence, and the fancy handwritten copy that was signed in August (the copy now displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.) It’s also the date that was printed on the Dunlap Broadsides, the original printed copies of the Declaration that were circulated throughout the new nation. So when people thought of the Declaration of Independence...
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...UNIT 3 TRENDS IN FEMINISM Structure 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Objectives 3.3 Liberal Feminism 3.3.1 Liberal Thought 3.3.2 Classical Liberal Feminism 3.3.3 Second Wave Liberal Feminism 3.3.4 Weakness/Limitations of the Liberal Feminism 3.3.5 Contribution to the Women’s Movement 3.4 Marxist Feminism 3.4.1 Foundations of Marxist Feminism 3.4.2 Other Key Elements in Marxist Feminism 3.4.3 Limitations of Marxist Feminism 3.4.4 Contribution to the Women’s Movement 3.5 Psychoanalytic Feminism 3.5.1 The Beginnings of Psychoanalytic Feminism – Countering Freudian Theories 3.5.2 Explanation by other Theorists 3.5.3 Limitations of Psychoanalytic Feminism 3.5.4 Contribution to the Women’s Movement 3.6 Radical feminism 3.6.1 Definition 3.6.2 The influences that shaped Radical Feminism 3.6.3 What are the variations of Radical Feminism? 3.6.3.1 Radical- Libertarian Feminism 3.6.3.2 Radical-Cultural Feminism 3.6.4 Radical Feminism – Its Structure 3.6.5 The Outcomes of the Movement 3.6.6 Critiques of Radical Feminism 3.6.7 Contribution to the Women’s Movement 3.7 Postmodern Feminism 3.7.1 Postmodern Thought 3.7.2 Postmodern rethinking of psychological explanation of gender 3.7.3 Postmodern Feminist 3.7.4 Limitations of Postmodern feminism 3.7.5 Contribution to the women’s Movement 3.8 Black Feminism and Womanism 3.8.1 The Beginnings of Black Feminism 3.9 Cyber Feminism 3.9.1 Origin of Cyber Feminism 3.9.2 Definition of the 100 Anti Thesis 3.9.3 Cyber art and its relation to Cyber feminism 3.9.4...
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...of JAWAHARLAL NEHRU The Discovery of India JAWAHARLAL NEHRU The Discovery of India DELHI OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD NEW YORK Oxford University ATHENS (Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 61X2 OXFORD AUCKLAND CAPE TOWN CALCUTTA FLORENCE NEW YORK BANGKOK ISTANBUL MADRID PARIS BOMBAY DELHI KARACHI MELBOURNE SINGAPORE DAR ES SALAAM HONG KONG MADRAS NAIROBI TOKYO KUALA LUMPUR MEXICO CITY TAIPEI TORONTO and associates in BERLIN IBADAN © Rajiv Gandhi 1985 First published 1946 by The Signet Press, Calcutta Centenary Edition 1989 Sixth impression 1994 Printed at Rekha Printers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi 110020 and published by Neil O'Brien, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110001 To my colleagues and co-prisoners in the A h m a d n a g a r Fort Prison C a m p from 9 August 1942 to 28 March 1945 FOREWORD My father's three books — Glimpses of World History, An Autobiograpy and The Discovery of India — have been my companions through life. It is difficult to be detached about them. Indeed Glimpses was' written for me. It remains t h e best introduction to the story of man for young and growing people in India and all over the world. The Autobiography has been acclaimed as not merely the quest of one individual for freedom, b u t as an insight into the making of the mind of new India. I h a d to correct the proofs of Discovery while my father was away, I think in Calcutta, and I was...
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