Dear readers,
Another month has passed since my last blog post, I hope you are all doing well. Here we are, a month away from the end of the academic year, counting down our days as a first-year university student. I have had an amazing and fruitful year, not only did I have the chance to study different materials from various disciplines, I have also met a lot of inspiring people.
Looking back on my year in ASTU100, I have had a lot of great opportunities to read and learn about different scholars. We have also studied multiple global issues and the controversies behind them. Throughout the year, we have read Persepolis, Obasan, Safe Area Gorazde …, by practicing our close reading skills with different genre and topic, I am able to identify certain features of academic writing from daily life writings. I am also capable of participating and contributing to the scholarly discussions in the academia. Moreover, the in-depth discussions on different historical events allow me to explore the relationship between the self and the world. In particular, on issues such as the Bosnian Genocide and 9-11, I was able to realize the culture of representation among media.
On that note, I am going to take “American Sniper” as an example to elaborate my point on the culture of representation among media. “American Sniper” ,as a movie about the war in Iraq, has been a controversial issue when it comes to the representation of war. It has taken the approach to represent a clear dividing line between the “good” and the “evil”. The way the movie presents itself has created a problematic situation in terms of the historical representation of such event. To further explain such concept, I will use the example of Darda’s work, “Precarious World: Rethinking Global Fiction in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist”. The concept of “who is grieve-able” has really influenced my way of understanding historical events or political issues. Media nowadays would often established the concept of “us” and “them” as a way to manipulate the opinions of the public. As scholars, we must acknowledge that the representation of historical events changes as different stakeholders takes on a different stance. When stories are told, some may choose to tell it based on their personal experience, while some may take on their national or ethnic identity thus telling a story through the voice of another community.
In a world where people are surrounded by ever-growing media and the advancing communication technology, one must understand the co-existing relationship among different narratives and the way our contemporary culture delivers such idea; as that, may probably be the most crucial tool in being aware of world issues and becoming a global citizen.