Week 4
This week, we will be slowing down the progression of screenings somewhat, and making a lane-shift into a parallel discussion of literature as well. Early in the week, you will have started to read the opening pages of Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man. (Note--of course--the distinction between this piece and the more popular(?) novel by H. G. Wells) . We've been looking so far at the various ways that people negotiate their minority status in anime, but see if you can find analogues or contrasts to what we've seen heretofore in Ellison's depiction of the Battle Royale in Chapter 1 of the novel. Try to read it allegorically (look for symbols and themes), and imagine what Ellison might be trying to say in his various discussions in the piece.
Additionally, we've also got an excerpt from Leo T. S. Ching's monograph, Becoming "Japanese". This work, whilst primarily a scholarly exploration of the nature and construction of the Japanese colonial empire in Taiwan, begins with an anecdote that might serve as a meaningful point of entry regarding the status of colonized/formerly-colonized peoples. We note here the significance of residual social and psychological scarring that results from colonialism as a system, and can pick up on the broader meanings of what is at stake in systemic domination and racialized oppression. Think about ways that these ideas complement or elaborate on what we've encountered earlier in War without Mercy. |
A Filmic representation of the prologue of Ellison's novel.
"Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man". YouTube. 4 May 2008. Web. 26 January 2015. |
We will finish up the week of continuing our discussions of race and empire by looking back on WWII in a rather distinctive sort of way. We've seen how we might reinterpret the war through our reading of John Dower's War without Mercy, and addressed the issues of Japanese colonialism in Leo Ching's Becoming "Japanese"; moving into the next week, though, we will take a look at several pieces of literary fiction as an artistic exploration of the significance of transpacific racializing strategies. We will be framing the discussion around WWII specifically--through our reading of Nobel Prize-winning fictionist, Oe Kenzaburo's novella, Prize Stock--but we will also be looking at broader themes of race and the American military as seen in Home, the novel of another Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison.
We'll be sticking with this work for the duration of the next week or so, so try to keep up with the readings as they appear on the Blackboard site. As this is a fictional piece, we'll be doing a bit more reading for a given assignment than we have been doing previously.
We'll be sticking with this work for the duration of the next week or so, so try to keep up with the readings as they appear on the Blackboard site. As this is a fictional piece, we'll be doing a bit more reading for a given assignment than we have been doing previously.
A quick note: Prize Stock is not a work for the faint of heart, as we will see in certain scenes within the text. Oe's work has considerable bearing on contextualising our discussions in light of the work it does in representing a Black soldier in the midst of (what is heavily suggested to be) WWII. Our conversations in class for this week will focus on various sections of the novella, the stereotypes they might be said to present, and the relationships between race and representation in literature and in pop cultural phenomena like anime. We'll be looking at potential conceptual crossovers as well, especially with regards to the matters of the Black soldier in both the Wartime and Postwar Japanese cultural milieu.
Points for your consideration:
Points for your consideration:
- Can we draw any parallels between these works and any pieces of (African) American fiction that you might have come across in high school?
- Does this seem to reflect any of the points raised in the Dower reading we did for the start of Week 3? Which ones? How?
- What work do we think Oe is attempting to do by including a Black character in this novella?
- Does our narrator, Frog, seem to be reliable? What do we make of his initial reaction to the Black soldier? How does this contrast to his final thoughts at the end of the novella?
- Generally, does there seem to be any trends with regards to naming in this work?