Still More Prose and Stuff

Here's another hot one that held my attention. There's a really nice tie with toys and cultural studies analysis, and a strong argument calling attention to why Pokemon must be deconstructed. I also realized that most of my selections about writing have been introductions thus far so I'll try to diversify my entries.

Does Pocket Monsters (Pokemon), the never-ending video game, anime, card game, and retail kitsch franchise, deserve a racial analysis? There have been serious studies of the cultural effects of the franchise by social scientists such as Joseph Jay Tobin, yet there has been very little cultural studies-oriented scholarship on the subject. More in-depth analyses of the ideological constructions in the Pokemon canon are non-existent, perhaps due to its status as a children's icon. However, I feel that the fact that children are its principal consumers makes its ideological analysis even more important, if we are to understand the ways in which the media interpellates and socializes us into ideology. An additional point of departure is the fact that Tobin and his peers did not grow up inundated with Pokemon, as many people in my generation did. For us, it was more than a toy: it was and continues to be a consuming obsession. It is no wonder that its ideological work has been heretofore unexamined. To that end, I would put forward the argument that the Pokemon canon displaces racial Otherness onto Pokemon, and in doing so attempts to ameliorate the potent racial anxieties of its audience with its utopic vision of unquestioned racial domination. However, I will also point to moments within the text that work to deconstruct -- in the Derridean sense -- the seeming unity of that vision.

More Prose and Stuff

Oooh! I like the structure of these sentences, and how it situates the film, Aladdin, in a social, cultural, and political context of anti-Arab sentiment in the US. It raises the potential political stakes from an animated feature like Aladdin. I also like the air of sarcasm too:

To be fair, no one expects Disney to provide a fair and balanced portrayal of another culture for it certainly has "Disnified" Chinese (Mulan), Native Americans (Pocahantas), and Indian (The Jungle Book) cultures. However, the depictions in Aladdin are particularly nefarious given the anti-Arab climate that was reigning in America during the first Gulf War and especially today in a post-9/11 context. The film Aladdin is essentially an Orientalist production laden with ideas of exotifiation, domestication, and negative connotations and stereotypes the West hold true about the East, which ultimately carries tremendous social and political ramifications for Arabs.

Prose and Stuff

As I read and correct final papers, I come across some beautifully written prose that I think are worth nothing especially given the skill of writing from the students at Grinnell College. This selection is from a paper analyzing the TV hit show Lost that I found to have a clear argument, a strong voice, and it's concise, direct, and full of theoretical and analytical excitement:

With its incredible popularity, one questions what kind of ideological influence Lost may have beneath its enticing narrative. After following Lost for five seasons and deciding to study its intrinsic sociological implications, I initially turned to a neocolonial discourse. After all, the show is about a group of outside people who come to a tropical island and engage in conflict with the "native" peoples there, who come to be known as the "Others"; it seemed plausible that Lost was re-enacting a colonial discourse. However, upon closer study, I was surprised to find a much more subversive reading of Lost than I initially thought plausible. Instead of reproducing the tropes of colonialism, in this paper I argue that Lost actually critiques neolonialism by inverting the process of "othering" and the characteristics of colonized people, which is revealed through the character's experience.