Made possible by people like Gandhi- Post Colonial Literature

I, Wordsmith, english major and blogmaster extrodinaire, have a confession to make.

I really like this book.


I like it for several reasons, the first of which is that it deals with a time period in history that i really enjoy reading about- Mughal India. Of course, it wasn't until I started reading this book that I realized the significance of this.

I first became interested in the Mughals (Or Moguls, depending on what you're reading) after reading a book on Jahanara, the daughter of Shan Jahan, the emperor who built the Taj Mahal and who is mentioned in Holder of the World as the World Ruler. It's because of the post-colonial literature movement that I can read about what India was like both before (and after) the British created their Raj there in the 1800s.

In HOTW, Bharati Mukherjee illuminates for us a story that would not have seen the light of day before the post-colonial movement, a story that allows inter-racial relationships to be seen in a somewhat positive light. She is telling the story that wouldn't be allowed to be told otherwise; that there are narratives besides the white narrative that have value and a place in the literary spectrum.

In a fanfiction that I'm writing now, one of the characters, when proposed the idea that the Taj Mahal is bigger and more fantastic than anything the English have constructed, she puts her nose in the air and replies,

"Barbaric. I suppose this great marble palace pales in comparison to St. James’ Palace. Your friend must be exaggerating; nothing can outstrip the grandeur of British architecture or the ingenuity of English builders."

If you were ever to venture to India," Another character replies," I think you would find much there that outstrips British ingenuity. Was it not the Romans who built the coliseum with nothing more than a few simple cranes and ladders? And did not the Greeks build the temples after which we fashion our own houses in the same manner? Those are the tools which still exist in India today to build their houses and temples. Simple people they may be now, barbaric, if you must, but do not underestimate their capability in erecting monuments. Once there were great kings in the Deccan, and their accomplishments make our English wars and castles look pale and puny in their shadow.”

The story takes place in the 1830s, just at the outset of the British Raj, and to be completely fair, I doubt that the character speaking there would have given the Mughals the time of day. But the fact remains that I as the author think that they deserve a place in my story, because I have been able to hear their part in world history and I like it.

The first character, Catherine, has never traveled outside of England, thinking that there is nothing there worth exploring, and the character who answers her, Horatio, is a ship's captain who, along with several other people in the conversation, has both been to India and seen all the marvelous things the Mughal Emperors did there. He tries to correct her idea of Oriental Decadence by reminding her that it wasn't until after the Viceroys began celebrating the Durbar did these shows of eastern wealth and power that she seems so adverse to actually began happening. These well-traveled men, who have been to parts of the world some people only dream about visiting, are trying to de-mystify why she thinks the way she does.

(On a historical note, the practice of Durbar wasn't actually celebrated until the 1860s under Lord Canning when Victoria became Empress of India. Empress, I should add, of a land she never even visited.)


And while we're talking about Posts, I guess we should talk about Post Modernism, the re-imagining of accepted forms to suit new purposes and methods of transmission. To put it in Professor Steve's words, Mo on a necktie. The story that I've been quoting to you from is, in my opinion, a type of what might be considered Post Modern literature- the fan fiction.

Fan Fiction is the art of taking an established piece of work (in the case of the above story, Pride and Prejudice, among other things; there's a note in my bio about it) and fiddling around with the characters, placing them in different or amusing situations, trying to write yourself into the story, or just exploring the nuances of place and person the author didn't get around to establishing. It's not necessarily Modernism on the chopping block, but it is the re-imagining of accepted forms. In this case, however, it's not architectural elements but characters. HOTW is in essence a fanfiction as well- it takes an already established story, and, with a bit of research and scholarly application, re-imagines Hawthorne's story.


While I'm really looking forward to completing Mukhergee's book, I'm not really looking forward to the end of these blogs. The end of the blogs means the end of the class, and I've really grown fond of all the people in my writing group.

Follow it in the Papers: Advertising Strategies and Tactics.

After a long study session rehashing Klein and Juffer until they could be rehashed no more, I remembered I still had to do one of these pesky things. Well, I'm kind of sick of talking about reclaiming the streets and boycotting clothes made in south american sweatshops, so I'm going to talk a little bit about strategies on the other end of Klein's party line: I'm going to talk about Advertising strategies.

If you look at advertisements for different companies, you'll notice that the ads have a slightly different flavor depending on who the target market is. Changing these flavors is a strategy, a over arching idea that dominates how a someone (or an army, or a marketing department, for that matter) does things. Each different flavor is a different string in the strategy, and on each string there are many different tactics, specific actions, words, or layouts that can draw your attention to one thing or another within the ad.

In my education class, we just finished a unit on how as teachers we can help students who live in poverty, and as part of this unit, we got a bunch of handouts on how people from different places on the socio-economic ladder deal with different situations. This information is actually really applicable to advertising.

For people living in poverty, possessions are People. If you have people, you're set, because obviously, stuff costs money, and money is something they don't have.

For the middle class, possessions are Stuff. real, tangible things we can use every day.

For the Wealthy, possessions are one of a kind objects, legacies and pedigrees. No one else has what they have. It's very elitist.

This shows a lot in high fashion advertising. When Dolce and Gabbana roll out their new fall collection (and we use the word collection because it implies that it has taken a lot of time to put together, it is beyond pricing, and it all has a common theme) they like to show it off as no one has shown it off before!

High Fashion advertising fetishizes the clothes, showing them off in outlandish situations so that we look past what the models are doing to look at what they're wearing while doing it. (This is why D&G ads are really fun to look at, for me, anyway)


The wealthy, with food, care about Presentation, how it looks, because obviously there's not a problem getting it or a problem with the quality of the food. These ads are all about Presentation. How does it look? This is what adbusters is making fun of when they put out faux CK ads that look like this:

The ads fetishize clothes, and normal human beings...well, they fetishize other things. Adbusters are trying to look past the clothes aspect into what the advertisement is also selling: Ideal body image.

Let's look at a different advertisement, one from say, JC Penny's. Much more middle class audience.

See, less about the image of the clothes and more of...well, just the clothes and what you as the consumer are going to be doing in them: Having fun. All the models in the JC Penney ad are smiling, not doing that fakey 'mysterious' look that you see on the models in the couture ad. The middle class doesn't care about image, they care about quality, not quantity, as the impoverished tend to care about, or presentation, as the wealthy care about.

Here's where I'd show you an advertisement geared towards poor folks, but that's right, they don't make those!

That's another marketing strategy: put money where it pays.

NOT A CLASS POST- random culture find

There's a movie coming out called "War, Inc" about a war that is 'the first ever war to be entirely outsourced to other companies' and which is apparently filled with advertising. It reminds me of Naomi Klein and I think it should be marked down on a "should see" list.

Plus it just looks ridiculous, which I think is a good enough reason to see any movie.

War, Inc @ IMDb.com

On a side note, I might just start posting more 'random culture finds' as I seem to come across a lot of them.

Going Public- Space and what the heck it has to do with this class

Barring a freak occurrence of snow in April, the chance that we were indeed going to have class on Friday was actually pretty high, and were it not for the freak occurrence of snow in April, we were going to talk about public space.

Why?

That's the question I asked myself on Friday morning when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my day, and I figured I should probably at least think about what class was going to be about if I couldn't actually go.

This is what I came up with:

Public Space creates Representation. Representation creates Agency, the ability to act and do things. Having people know who you are, either as a celebrity or as a group of people, gives you the power to do things -- Agency.

Public space can be anything, a billboard, a park, or the airwaves of TV. This is why free speech is important, because free speech helps create public space, a place where people can voice their opinions and represent ideas, concepts, and groups, giving them the ability to act. This is why we have publicly traded companies, public television, public libraries, public lots of things! By making them available to the people, they give the people space to act. That's why it's important to have unregulated public space, free from commercialism that tells us who we are or who we should be, because that's forced agency, and that's actually a loss of power for the consumer. That's why Naomi Klein is scared of the corporate university, because then those students are loosing their agency for forced agency, which, as I mentioned, is no agency at all.

Without public space, the people (all people) loose their representation and their ability to act. In my education class now, we're beginning a unit on homosexuality in schools and whether we should teach students to accept it or not. The jury's still out because we were supposed to discuss this in class on Friday, but the point remains that schools can be Public Space: they can be a place to create representation.

Now, you can argue with me till the cows come home about whether homosexuals are right or wrong, but the fact still remains that they exist, they are fellow human beings, and their side of the story deserves to be heard. I started thinking about the history of education and how we're kind of at a crossroads here that future education students will be thinking about and judging us on. First we had a debate about whether to have public education at all, then to have (white)women get education, then to get (white) women and men to be able to get an education at the same school, then to get blacks and other minorities to be able to get an education at the same school, and now we're concerned about homosexuals.

It's a matter of Representation; we wanted to show that different groups existed. Well, homosexuals exist, so let's show students they do. It's up to the students to determine whether they think they're 'right' or 'wrong' for being who they are. Representation creates Agency, and Agency is Action. Action, in this case, is discussion, and I think we can all learn a lot from that. That's what school's all about, isn't it? Learning?

Or maybe it's snow days. I'm not sure.

Represent! : Women in "The Nanny Diaries"

I'll be the first to admit that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to blog about for this unit, and then, after a very enlightening conversation with Professor Steve, I had an idea. A very, very lucky idea.

Not having any pressing homework to do on Tuesday night (yeah, I know. None. Beat that.) I decided to check out a movie and not having a great selection at Saint Ben's of the movies I wanted to see (usually involving war or an international crisis of some kind) I decided to watch the Nanny Diaries. Little did I know that this was the perfect movie to talk about representation with because it not only covers nannies and the upper crust elite they serve, but also single moms.

Annie Braddock, the young woman who is telling the audience her story, explains early on that she is the "Chanel Bag" of nannies because she, unlike most of the other nannies in the film, speaks English as her first language, is college educated, and is white. Huh. Good Help on upper east side manhattan = white= status symbol. Interesting.

More interesting to me after our discussion on Tuesday was the portrayal of Annie's mom, who- guess what?- is a single mom. "And here's the woman who reared me- pretty much by herself," Annie introduces her mother. "She's a nurse- note the shoes." Even with this harmless comment we're given a picture of a woman who works so hard she probably just came from work to see her daughter graduate and forgot a pair of nice shoes to wear.

After graduation, Annie's mom gives Annie a graduation present of a suit, saying that it's "not much" and brings up her hopes that Annie can become a famous CFO, not ending up like her father, who owns "a double wide trailer in Scranton." Clearly, money's kind of an issue in this family, and Mrs. Braddock wants her daughter to succeed. "I would give the world to be sitting where you're sitting right now," she reminds her daughter. "You are so much smarter than I was. No man is going to squash your dreams."

Okay, we're four minutes into the movie. Let's recap. Single mom is: hardworking, potentially overworked, underpaid, and...man-hating?. I'm sure there's a lot of single moms who don't fit that last one, but there you go: In order to be single, she has to have a reason for not having a husband, and Mrs. Braddock's is that her husband was insupportive and squashed her dreams.

We'll come back to the single mom later: let's get back to Annie, who now pages through a series of stereotypical women's roles in New York- Tribeca Fashionista (who has to be divorced) Park Slope Lawyer (who apparently has to be a lesbian; riddle that one out) or Central Park Bag Lady. Riveting options, all of which seem to imply that if you have a man in your life, you can't succeed. And if you do have a man in your life, like Fifth Avenue Mom Mrs. X, Annie's employer, you have no occupation, you're not working for your own income and the only thing you do in life is shop.

This movie does so much for women, doesn't it?

Moving on. Annie has a dream about her future, which involves being closed in on one side by the suited members of the buisness world and on the other side by her mother, who's shouting at her, hands on her hips. Another mark of the single mom: overprotective.

All these Fifth Avenue moms want Annie as their nanny because, as mentioned earlier, she's white, college educated, and 'terminally single', the Chanel bag of nannies. Chanel is exclusive and exclusive in nanny world means not ethnic minority and educated, which means...that all nannies are black, asian, or hispanic, don't speak english well, and generally trampled over. Funny, the two women who wrote the book this movie is based on are white. Anyway. Mrs. X talks about how she gave up her professional dreams to be a mom, and how she doesn't have enough hours in the day to go to her Parent's society meetings, so that she can learn how to be a better mother... for the son she's going to be pawning off on her live-in nanny. Right.

I'm not even half way through the movie yet and I've already found so much to talk about in the way women in general are represented, in this movie, at least. There aren't really any positives in the bunch, unless you count Annie's friend Lynette, who is spunky, independent, and forward thinking. Oh yeah, and she's also played by Alica Keys. Not that I don't love her character, I do, but white women can't be spunky and independent and black women have to be? What up with that? And oh, by the way, the first time we meet Lynette she's getting off the 8 am train from Manhattan in 'last night's party clothes' and staggering a little bit. Huh.

The Nanny Diaries is full of stereotypes, but I figure that it's supposed to be: the viewers are supposed to walk away from this overblown version of real life thinking, "Now wait a minute, this is ridiculous!" It's satire about the world of Nannies, disguised as a chick flick with a diaper bag.

Clever.