Instructions
In Reading Culture, the readings and exercises address the many aspects of colonialism, post-colonialism, and transnationalism. Choose one of the following prompts to for the topic of your essay. Note which prompt it is in the assignment line of the heading along with the assignment title (Ex: Essay #2, Transnationalism, Prompt 3). Remember to refer to the source material as the basis for your discussion, analysis, and argument.
1. Choose one or more of the concepts presented in the chapter that is related to transnationalism. Explore in a variety of ways the concept/term(s) that you have chosen and discuss various denotations (dictionary definition/s) and connotations of the term. This is an argument paper and needs to contain a thesis, so in addition to explicating your ideas about the meaning of the term/concept, describe one or two situations that exemplify your definition/description and explain why it's problematic (challenging, positive, negative, etc.) in a transnational world. Be sure to discuss its use in the readings.
2. Write an essay describing and analyzing the experience of reading Gloria Anzaldua's "How To Tame a Wild Tongue." How do the mix of languages and the fragmentary character of the text put special demands on the reader (in general and if the reader is unfamiliar with both languages)? How and in what sense is this reading experience equivalent to what Anzaldua calls the "borderland"? What does your position as a reader on the border reveal about the nature of encounters across cultures in multicultural America?
3. In many respects, Pratt's analysis of Guaman Poma's letter is the centerpiece of her essay, the occasion for her to develop the notion of the "literate arts of the contact zone." If her terms are useful, you should be able to apply them to a more contemporary form of cultural expression. Write an essay that works with the notion of the "contact zone" to analyze a form of cultural expression written, produced, or performed in the contact zone. The choice of material is up to you, but keep in mind how Guaman Poma's letter creates a self-representation of a subordinate culture that responds to unequal relations of power by combining indigenous material with appropriations from the dominant metropolitan culture.
4. Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the 1931 story of Molly and Daisy Craig and their cousin Gracie Fields, who were victims of Australia's "Stolen Generations." Do a little research on the "Stolen Generations" and write an essay that explores this colonial practice of removing indigenous children from their homes and families. You might also draw parallels between this practice in Australia and the same practice of moving Native American children off the reservations in the United States, mostly with the same intent. This practice was also challenged in the film Schooling the World, which claims the practice is an extension of colonialism. What connections can you draw between these films? What is relevant about this in terms of the issues that we have been discussing?
5. Write an analysis of one or more of the slum tourism Web sites, using the supplementary articles as a way to put slum tourism in historical perspective and to make sense of its appeal to today's tourists or volunteers and the inherent problems as well. Consider, for example, how the Web sites represent slum life, the people who live in slums, the role of the slum tourism company, and what tourists have to gain by taking slum tours. Take a position regarding the positives and negatives of this phenomenon.
6. Write an essay that compares the transnational encounters of slum tourism, as you've come to understand them in your reading, to the transnational encounters Amitava Kumar describes in "Passport Photos." Consider, for example, how the freedom of relatively affluent tourists from North America and Europe to travel and visit slums compares to the attempts of documented or undocumented people to cross the U.S. border. What does this comparison reveal about the movement of people across the globe and the nature of transnational encounters? What is problematic about it?
7. Write an essay that takes a position on the various practices of slum tourism, voluntouring, and other "missionary" practices with indigenous populations around the world, including education. What are the best ways for programs like this to be effective? What should they accomplish and what are the pitfalls? What restrictions should there be on for-profit ventures? What government regulations should there be on non-profits? Be sure to reference the course material in your argument.