The Coordinated Arts Program Conference held today provided thoughtful and inspiring ideas on contentious contemporary topics. From Kiki Jang’s ‘Musical Imagery: Music in Your Head’ to Kiran Kazani’s ‘Humanitarian Aid Vs. Political and Corporate Gain’, the variety of responses was astounding. A trend noted in many of the panels was that of effecting change, be […]
The film ‘Through a Blue Lens” provides interesting forays into the documentary genre. The message provided to the viewers is that the Downtown East Side is a dark, dirty, dangerous place and that staying on the drug-free path is the right way to go. Thus, its target audience of high school and university students is […]
Originating in Olympia, Greece, the Olympic Games were designed at their commencement to foster a sense of community between the Greek cities. This along with the aim to ‘show the physical qualities and evolution of the performances accomplished by young people’ come directly from the official website of the Olympic movement. The extreme power that the […]
In the interview that Fred Wah provided for Canadian Literature in September of 2000, he highlights contemporary issues of race within his experiences. Diamond Grill takes up issues of identity, ethnicity and responsibility throughout, but what is interesting is how Wah’s experiences have shaped his interactions with current Asian students of his about race. In the interview, Wah […]
Fred Wah’s novel ‘Diamond Grill’ concerns issues of ethnicity, identity and, as he coins it, ‘living on the hyphen’. Wah gives this no man’s land of belonging a shot of personal reality, relating it to being something lived on rather than in, and implies it occurs in many others in this definition of racial hybridity. […]
In today’s BBC article about the new South African film about Nelson Mandela, Milon Nkosi highlights the disparities of race even in today’s society. The film, which is a life narrative of Mendela’s life, struck well with most who left the theatre after it finished, which is the method with which Nkosi collected his qualitative data. […]
Evan Aluyen’s post about Malala Yousafzai was particularly striking, for it’s evaluative comments on censorship. His main arguments involved the positive elements of censorship, in that officials reserve the right to censor the media produced in the country due to cultural sensitivity. He also made the point though that banning the book is a violation […]
Facebook is an intriguing source for an autobiographical site due to it’s relative newness and the structure it has which makes it so successful. The site has unique features which make it continually popular, and with frequent updates it is constantly adapting to the public’s improvements to the site. While the company gets larger and […]
The novel ‘What is the What’, written by Dave Eggers, concerns the migration of children across South Sudan and into Ethiopia and Kenya. In it, Eggers provides the detailed memories of one such boy, deemed the ‘Lost Boys’ for their nomadic nature, in a rich autobiographical site. The problem lies within just this element of […]
In class last week, the majority of the Thursday lecture involved analyzing certain effective elements within ‘What is the What’, by Dave Eggers. One such element is the genre of which ‘What is the What’ is a part of, bildungsroman. A major problem or loss occurring in the earliest stages of the novel, and multiple […]