Author: li.10698

Text Review-Green Book-Chenlong Li

by

The text that I chose to review for this assignment is Green Book by Peter Farrelly. In 1962, Tony “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, a tough bouncer, is looking for work when his nightclub is closed for renovations. The most promising offer turns out to be the driver for the African American classical pianist Don Shirley for a concert tour to the deep south states. Tony accepts the job and they begin their tour with the Green Book, a travel guide for safe travel through America’s racial segregation. As they witness and endure America’s injustices on the road, they find a respect for each other’s talent and finally become good friends.

Green Book | Universal Pictures

Throughout the film, it’s not hard to find that Don is always treated as Other by different groups of people because of his different types of identities.Just like Marji in Persepolis, who feels this kind of ” Other-ness” due to her identities as both a foreigner to the Austrians and a woman, Don is also confused by his multiple identities and couldn’t find a sense of belonging to both sides-the White and the Black.  Even though he is a talented, elegant and gentlemanly pianist whose music is praised by every audience, he still face racisms and discriminations due to his skin color. He is an outsider out of the stage, for example, he is not allowed to use the same bathroom as those white audiences and is not able to have dinner with white people in a restaurant. Meanwhile, due to his highly economic status and educated background, he is not accepted by his Black community as well. This way, he becomes someone in the middle, as he is not completely white or black.

What’s more, the film also depicts some systemic injustices as well. After a show, Don finds that Tony is gambling with other black drivers, and says ” they didn’t have a choice whether to be inside or out, but you did.” Despite the fact that Don is aiming to let Tony be a man with aspirant, he also points out an injustice in America which is the Black people are not granted the equal rights as white people. At that time in the south states, black people are born to be the slaves and become lower class, they don’t have a chance to get rid of the poverty at the beginning. But Tony, as a white man who is not born in a wealthy family, still has a chance to change his status through hard work. Don himself also suffers from the injustice brings by the power system. He tries his best to get into the upper class but is failed simply because his skin color.

Through this movie, the creator wants to say that people should not be confused with multiple identities, instead, they should mix the part that’s good for them to fit in and also remain the part who they actually are. And people should have the courage like Don to fight against racism and injustice.

Dairy of Systemic Injustice – Systemic Racism Against African Americans

by

In the week reading the letter by Martin Luther King, we talked about the idea of systemic injustice. Something first came up in my mind is the death of George Floyd, which causes huge attention at that time. At the beginning, he was crying in his car for his mother’s death, the police officer reached him for suspicious activity of using counterfeit and insisted him getting out of the car. When Floyd was explaining what happened, one of the police officer suddenly pulled out the gun without any reason, which scared him quite a bit. Then Floyd began begging and kept saying “I’m sorry, don’t shoot me”. After he came out of the car, the police officer handcuffed him and tried to put him into the police car. While Floyd showed his resistance and insisted that he was claustrophobic. Then the officer named Chauvin decided to let him on the ground and put his knee on Floyd’s neck. The police officer didn’t react at all when Mr. Floyd kept saying “I can’t breath”, which leads to the death of him in the end.

The whole thing shows clearly the police brutality in African Americans. Why would the police officer pull out the gun even though Floyd did not do anything wrong? The reason may be that African Americans are more likely to be suspects and are affected through every stage of the criminal justice system. The status by US census bureau and Statista shows that African Americans are facing much higher chance of being fatally shot relative to their overall numbers in the US population( 14% of the  population accounts for 23% of the fatal shootings by the police). As for the criminal justice system( law enforcement, courts, corrections), one out of every three Black boys born today can expect to be sentenced to prison, compared 1 out 6 Latino boys; one out of 17 white boys. All these statistics shows that African Americans are facing systemic injustice. But what more important is that the one who killed Floyd is not punished at all, which makes me believe that this is an example of systemic racism. The system is supposed to protect people with their rights no matter what races they are.

Just like Gayatri Spivak defines what a subaltern is–those are completely separate from the One and Other, the other to the other. George Floyd was also a subaltern. Those oppressed African Americans are able to make their voices be heard through protests or other activities like march. However, George Floyd couldn’t make his voice be heard because he was died. And this injustice will definitely bring lots of impacts as well. For example, when the police brutalities against Black people are more frequent, people from black communities will lose their faith in police systems and less likely to cooperate with police officers. And when they do not trust police systems, they will less likely to report the crimes, which make them more hard to participate in the society. And when they are less participating in the society, a natural “segregation” will show up. To solve the problem, I think the first thing is to acknowledge that the racism actually exists. Only when we begin to face up the problems, can we have a possibility to solve the systemic racism and make all races unite as one.

 

work cited

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52877678

https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/

Context Research Presentation-Can the Subaltern Speak by Gayatri Spivak

by

In Spivak’s writing, “Can the Subaltern Speak”, she mentioned a term “subaltern studies” which helps some part of her propositions about subaltern. After the reading, I would like to focus on the basics of subaltern studies. The formation of  subaltern studies as an intervention in South Asian historiography occurred in the wake of the growing crisis of the Indian state in the 1970s. At that time, nationalists struggled against British rule because the “program of capitalist modernity sharpened social and political inequalities and conflicts”(Prakash, page1476). Subaltern studies was inspired by Ranajit Guha, a distinguished historian os India which was also mentioned in the reading. Guha and eight scholars based in India, UK, and Australia constituted the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies until from 1982 to 1988. The word “subaltern” came from Antonio Gramsci’s writings,”refers to subordination in terms of class, caste, gender, race, and was used to signify the centrality of dominated relationships in history.” Subaltern studies mainly focus on the historiographical contest over the representation of the culture and politics of people. Accusing colonialists, nationalists, and Marxist interpretations of robbing the common people of their agency, and it’s a new approach to restore the history to the subordinated. The “subaltern” now appears in many studies on Africa, Latin America, and Europe, and what remained consistent is the effort to rethink history from the perspective of subaltern.

Return to Spivak herself, She is one of the influential critic who is related to Post-colonialism  , Feminism, Deconstruction and Marxism. And I will also introduce some backgrounds of the people mentioned in the reading. She was a follower of Derrida, and criticizes Foucault accusing him in cooperating with capitalism and imperialism.As a member of “Subaltern Studies Collective”, “She attacks the Eurocentric attitudes of the West. She holds that knowledge is never innocent, it is always operated by western economical interest and power”(Ambesange Praveen, page48).

 

sources:

Ambesange Praveen, V. “Postcolonialism: Edward Said & Gayatri Spivak.” Research Journal of Recent Sciences E-ISSN 2277 (2016): 2502.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography.” Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1 no. 1, 2000, p. 9-32. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/23873.

Prakash, Gyan. “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism.” The American Historical Review, vol. 99, no. 5, 1994, pp. 1475–1490. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2168385. Accessed 6 Feb. 2021.