The documentaries we viewed this week were about sexualities, and how people identify based on their sexual orientation, whether it be lack of a sexual expression or activity, as in (A)Sexual, or the object of their sexual drive and attraction, as with Married to the Eiffel Tower. Both of these concepts, asexuality and objectumsexuality, are […]
In 2008, Jen Ackerman spent a month at Kentucky State Reformatory to document images of mentally ill people being taken care of by guards and administrators inside. The images are extremely brutal, showing people be denied basic human contact in their most vulnerable moments, showing mutilated, destroyed bodies in inhumane conditions. And yet, the images […]
To my understanding of Spivak’s piece, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, she discusses the way in which Western academics investigate other cultures, but particularly, in the studies of the most disenfranchised or powerless group of the social hierarchy. Spivak works with postcolonial thought, where she criticizes the work of predominantly white male academic’s depiction of the […]
I recently watched Persepolis, a French-Iranian film based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi with the same name. The film was is an autobiographical cartoon about Satrapi’s life living in Iran through a revolution and a war, living in Germany as an Iranian teen, moving back to Iran after the war ended, and eventually […]
The piece we read by Spivak was difficult to read both logistically and emotionally. I am not incredibly sure that I understood the complexity of the issue at hand, but from what I did grasp, I saw a large parallel to McMillian’s “Performing Objects.” For example, let us look at the following quote by Spivak: “This […]
In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak makes the claim that the Subaltern, a term that is hard to define but in some sense can be thought of the as “the least powerful group of the most colonized people”, (shout out to Sarah for that summary video that helped a lot) have no “voice” or way […]
Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Spivak is a piece that focuses on how the experiences and the feelings produced from these lived experiences of marginalized groups are skewed by second hand reports from white academics and media. Spivak’s piece immediately made me think of a Ted Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called “The Danger […]
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s piece, “Can the Subaltern Speak”, can easily be applied to news coverage of modern tragedies. For example, these ideas are relevant to the reporting of the massacre at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston on June 17, 2015. As Spivak says, the colonizer creates a narrative with knowledge collected from words rather than experiences. […]
In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, the questioned is raised of whether or not the subaltern can speak and be able to have their own voice that has not been distorted through the lens of primarily white academics, or through the lens of someone who has not experienced what they are going […]
Can The Subaltern Speak? is a significant piece of work authored by Gayatri Spivak, and became an extremely important essay within postcolonial theory. The piece is quite dense– the beginning sections seem to be conversations with philosophers like Deleuze and Foucault. In the concluding section, however, Spivak truly digs into the meat of her argument. From […]
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