I hadn’t given y’all…

I hadn't given y'all Vince's last two sample questions -- I'm posting them here, just because I think they're interesting questions:

6) Edward Said argues that "Orientalism also encouraged a peculiarly (not to say invidiously) male conception of the world" which figured the Orient as female, with "its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability" (206-8). The Western imagination has for centuries pictured the East as the mysterious Other, the inscrutable Orient, a feminized entity to be desired, seduced, explored, and conquered  in what Chandra Mohanty terms the "Western ideological and political project [of humanism] which involves the necessary recuperation of the East' and Woman' as others." As Lisa Lowe further points out, "Such associations of Orientalism with romanticism are not coincidental, for the two situations of desire  the occidental fascination with the Orient and the male lover's passion for his female beloved  are structurally similar. Both depend on a structure that locates an Other -- as woman, as oriental scene  as inaccessible, different, beyond."

Consider the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality  and discuss how issues of gender and sexuality shift, affect, and complicate how we talk about racial otherness. Consider at least three specific literary texts on your reading list (e.g., Woman in the Dunes, The Lover, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown, Heart of Darkness, etc.)

7) Discuss your own positionality in regard to issues of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and aesthetics; and how your own complex status -- as hybrid, ambivalent, othered, dominant, artist, metropolitan, gendered, bisexual, intellectual, and so on -- affects, deepens, distorts (or whatever) your own perceptions of these issues.

My committee knows me pretty good by now. :-) Although what Vince could possibly have meant by "dominant"....hmmm....

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