Jennifer Diaz
February 27, 2017
SOS Com Alt
Sem Pre-Write
Word Count: 297
Passages:
“What Brooks also calls “too-muchness” produces moments of spectacular visibility that exceed the advertisers’ intended and literal meanings. In the era of conspicuous consumption the “too-muchness” of the black and Asian bodies as represented in these trade cards is of key importance. The affective excess and semiotic overload of these images encode the use of disgust to facilitate and accompany the white bourgeois consumers disavowal and enjoyment of commodity pleasure.” Pg. 150
“…reminding me that the archive, and in particular the archive attached to minority presence in the Americas, is always either incomplete or inconsistent, always subject to the control and interests of its organizers and institutional location.” Pg. 151
Tompkins 2012;
“What is clear now is that the West’s fascination with the primitive has to do with its own crises in identity, with its own need to clearly demarcate subject and object even while flirting with the other ways of experiencing the universe.” Pg 367
“Contemporary working-class British clan playfully converges the discourse of desire, sexuality, and the Other, evoking the phrase getting “a bit of the Other” as a way to speak about sexual encounter. Fucking is the Other. Displacing notion of Otherness from race, ethnicity, skin-color, the body emerges as a site of contestation where sexuality is the metaphoric Other that threatens to take over, consumer, transform via the experience of pleasure.” Pg 367
News Media Context:
Is Arizona’s Ban on Mexican-American Studies Legal?
Does an Arizona law banning Mexican-American studies curriculum in public schools intentionally discriminate against Hispanics? That’s the question a federal appeals court has claimed warrants a trial.
http://www.ewa.org/blog-latino-ed-beat/arizonas-ban-mexican-american-studies-legal
Discussion:
When Arizona wanted to ban Mexican-American Studies from a Tucson School curriculum, it was the ruling-white classes display of power. And although this doesn’t have anything to do with commodity pleasure, although we might be able to argue that public education is commodified, especially higher education, it is a direct reflection of their power and they received pleasure from excluding this piece of history, taking this “bit of the other” and doing with it what they wanted. In this case the bit of the other is history and what they do with it is deem it illegal and not credible.
One could say that Arizona, which was once a part of Azatlan, which is what we call Mexico today, may have a bit of an identity crises regarding their past and present. Why would they want to share the history of the people who once roamed and “owned” this land? That history is not needed anymore, because it doesn’t pertain to the current ruler. Minority presence in the United States has always been tampered with. Photographer Edward S. Curtis took photographs of “the modern Native American.” His work was hailed as the most ambitious work in publishing since the production of the King James Bible. He captured beautiful shots of indigenous people, dressed in traditional clothing and interacting with horses, just like they used to. There is one photograph of two men sitting in front of a teepee with “all of their material items.” But one item was too modern and ruined the image Curtis wanted to portray. In order to keep the staus quo and the beauty of the natural, primitive, native, Curtis “photoshopped” the clock that sat amongst the mens items. It was just too like our world to be a part of this picture.