During the past week in our Arts Studies course, we have started to talk about our literature review: a conversation created by the writer between scholars in terms of a bigger issue. I found this task interesting since it would allow us to create an imaginary conversation between highly intellectual people with ourselves as mediums. This task seems to be intriguing because of the fact that it is in fact a conversation and not just a “monologue” in which we would just see a diarrhea of words that would be harder to understand. Adding to this, I enjoy the vagueness of the topic each one of us has to analyze. It is open for interpretation and be malleable to our interests. We have to research a “big issue” in which we would have to read from different scholars from the UBC library and obtain different sources in order to orchestrate this conjoint voices into a conversation.
One of the biggest issues that I saw with the past reading of Persepolis was that it depicted Iran as truly one of the worst places on Earth. Nevertheless, I started noticing more and more that the literature that manages to break into Western markets are the stories that portray anything outside the US as horrible. Not only Persepolis, but if we see at other pieces of literature that are present in pop culture like best-sellers from Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns) in which Hosseini captures the feel of life in a Third World country like Afghanistan or Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) who only presents a (fictitious) story about a Pakistani who is living the American Dream, working in Wall Street and graduating from Princeton, that pulls a smile when 9/11 occurred. Because of books like these, negative stereotypes are reinforced, aiding the US government to gain support and use as a legitimate cause to invade or intervene in a country.
Coming from what is considered to be a Less Economically Developed Country, Mexico, I grew up with people constantly questioning me about stereotypes that were out of the world but never questioned and believed. In my recent travels through Europe I was asked several times if Mexico had Internet, Water, Restaurants and so. When I was in boarding school in the UK, I was asked if I was the Prince of Mexico because they had never seen a mexican without a moustache. These negative stereotypes are portrayed throughout Western society and are causing a negative effect that as days go by become more and more uninformed.
I believe that our duty as Global Citizens is to stop the enforcements of stereotypes which bring a negative effect to society. I believe that a good way to change this is questioning our international peers how is life in their country and looking at different sources, not just basing ourselves in one. In essence, we as students need to understand that how we live is not much more different as people our age around the world live, same ideals and desire but just done in a different style.
Here is now a collection of more google searches that show how these stereotypes exist in Modern Society.
