(no subject)
I always like it when subject matter from one class spills over into other classes. Perhaps I just like coincidences. In my English 202 class we're reading books about India. In my English 235 class we're reading stories, poems, and two books written by American Indian authors. Two different kinds of Indians with two very similar histories. The colonization of India and the Americas, the classification of native citizens as "second class" or "savage heathens." The discrimination, the displacement...it's all there. To a lesser in India than in America. In the 1800's, the government all but obliterated the native population and tried to squeeze them all into "Indian Territory." Otherwise known as the state of Oklahoma. Whereas in India the British merely deepened the separations between castes and made inappropriate use of a social structure that was already in place. And in both cases, those who adopt the Western/European ways of life are more socially accepted. There's one line of The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra that reads "They looked remote and abstracted even while talking to you, and you wondered what memories of lost homelands were decaying behind the piercing sadness of their stoic...faces." He's talking about Tibetan refugees in Dharamshala, but it could just as easily have been a description from a Western novel.
I spent money I shouldn't have and bought "Into the West" so I could finish watching it, and I'm glad I did. It's AMAZING. Depressing and terrifying that humans could do things like that to each other, but truly one of the more honest stories I've seen about how the West was "won." I cried a lot while I watched it. Granted, I stayed up until 6:30 this morning so I could finish watching it, but it was worth it. Something I found particularly creative and also disturbing is the sequence that takes place after the Battle at Wounded Knee. Every image you see is a complete reenactment of actual photographs taken on the field after the battle took place. I forget the website, but I saw the pictures online a few months ago, and while the mini-series is wonderful, the photographs of the real thing have so much more inherent sorrow in them.
It's nice to be absorbed in what I'm learning instead of just doing the work because I have to. I'd forgotten what it's like to enjoy going to class.
I spent money I shouldn't have and bought "Into the West" so I could finish watching it, and I'm glad I did. It's AMAZING. Depressing and terrifying that humans could do things like that to each other, but truly one of the more honest stories I've seen about how the West was "won." I cried a lot while I watched it. Granted, I stayed up until 6:30 this morning so I could finish watching it, but it was worth it. Something I found particularly creative and also disturbing is the sequence that takes place after the Battle at Wounded Knee. Every image you see is a complete reenactment of actual photographs taken on the field after the battle took place. I forget the website, but I saw the pictures online a few months ago, and while the mini-series is wonderful, the photographs of the real thing have so much more inherent sorrow in them.
It's nice to be absorbed in what I'm learning instead of just doing the work because I have to. I'd forgotten what it's like to enjoy going to class.