scholarly journals Representation of the Orient in Pasolini’s Arabian Nights

Author(s):  
Roohollah Roozbeh Koohshahee ◽  
Alireza Anushirvani

This article aims at studying the representation of the Orient in Pasolini’s film Arabian Nights(1974). Since this film is a faithful adaptation of Thousand and One Nights it will be examined as carrying the same ideology which the text carries. The text of Thousand and One Nights established and legitimized orientalism in the west. Thus the movie follows suit in institutionalizing Orientalism. This is obtained by a close watching analysis and by looking at the images of the Orient, the plot itself, potential stylistic features which expresses images or attitudes in this regard. Our hypothesis is that the Orient in this movie is portrayed in accordance with notions of representation of the Other being depicted as, amongst other aspects, exotic, sexual, erotic and as a homogenous mass. Pasolini portrays Oriental men and woman as bodies in the duality of mind and body, and portrays them as a homogenous mass this is merely due to their belonging to a particular culture or race. The film represents the Oriental men and women as having a defining interest in sex and eroticism. It displays an exoticising Western view of the Oriental culture.

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 205-214
Author(s):  
Martine Renouprez ◽  

The Western view of the world is fundamentally a binary one, in which institutions (political, scientific and religious) have tried to pass off as natural those distinctions which are cultural in origin, particularly those concerning men and women. The male/female organic distinction has been used as supposed evidence for the creation of gender constructs. However, biology today shows that an infinite diversity of sexual orientations and identities exists within both animal and human worlds. What is the effect of “otherness” within oneself when “I am the other”? The post-modern novel Chéri-Chéri by Philippe Djian questions the legitimacy of human binary and the distinction between sexes and genders.


Author(s):  
Yeong-Mi LEE

The aim of this paper is to review Wacław C. Sieroszewski’s (1858-1945) view of Korea. He, well-known Polish writer, traveled to Korea, i. e., Daehan Empire (大韓帝國), in fall of 1903, and published Korea: Klucz Dalekiego Wschodu (1905). Considering that most of travelogues of Korea were written by American, British, French, and German, so-called “Western powers,” KKDW was a pretty valuable book.The author believes that Western view of Korea was notably changed around the late eighteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans did not ignore or belittle Korea and Korean. They regarded Korea as a rich and well-systemized country, and Korean as an intelligent nation, although they had very little knowledge of Korea. On the other hand, generally speaking, they degraded Korea and Korean in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Sieroszewski was one of them. Poland was one of the weakest countries in Europe, but his view was not different from that of American, British, French, and German authors.Sieroszewski was favorably impressed by Japan before he came to Korea in October, 1903, and, as a result, he constantly compared Korea and Japan. He even wrote that Japan was better than Europe in some ways. He truly believed that Japan was the only country to carry out a desirable reform for Korea. Meanwhile, he never approved the Russia’s imperialist ambition for Korea. He considered Japan as an agent of the West. In conclusion, his idea of Korea and the East was quite similar to that of other contemporary Western travelers.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Aysel KAMAL ◽  
Sinem ATIS

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962) is one of the most controversial authors in the 20th century Turkish literature. Literature critics find it difficult to place him in a school of literature and thought. There are many reasons that they have caused Tanpinar to give the impression of ambiguity in his thoughts through his literary works. One of them is that he is always open to (even admires) the "other" thought to a certain age, and he considers synthesis thinking at later ages. Tanpinar states in the letter that he wrote to a young lady from Antalya that he composed the foundations of his first period aesthetics due to the contributions from western (French) writers. The influence of the western writers on him has also inspired his interest in the materialist culture of the West. In 1953 and 1959 he organized two tours to Europe in order to see places where Western thought and culture were produced. He shared his impressions that he gained in European countries in his literary works. In the literary works of Tanpinar, Europe comes out as an aesthetic object. The most dominant facts of this aesthetic are music, painting, etc. In this work, in the writings of Tanpinar about the countries that he travelled in Europe, some factors were detected like European culture, lifestyle, socio-cultural relations, art and architecture, political and social history and so on. And the effects of European countries were compared with Tanpinar’s thought and aesthetics. Keywords: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Europe, poetry, music, painting, culture, life


Author(s):  
Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Transnational films representing intimacy and inequality disrupt and disgust Western spectators. When wounded bodies within poverty entangle with healthy wealthy bodies in sex, romance and care, fear and hatred combine with desire and fetishism. Works from the Philippines, South Korea, and independents from the United States and France may not be made for the West and may not make use of Hollywood traditions. Rather, they demand recognition for the knowledge they produce beyond our existing frames. They challenge us to go beyond passive consumption, or introspection of ourselves as spectators, for they represent new ways of world-making we cannot unsee, unhear, or unfeel. The spectator is redirected to go beyond the rapture of consuming the other to the rupture that arises from witnessing pain and suffering. Self-displacement is what proximity to intimate inequality in cinema ultimately compels and demands so as to establish an ethical way of relating to others. In undoing the spectator, the voice of the transnational filmmaker emerges. Not only do we need to listen to filmmakers from outside Hollywood who unflinchingly engage the inexpressibility of difference, we need to make room for critics and theorists who prioritize the subjectivities of others. When the demographics of filmmakers and film scholars are not as diverse as its spectators, films narrow our worldviews. To recognize our culpability in the denigration of others unleashes the power of cinema. The unbearability of stories we don’t want to watch and don’t want to feel must be borne.


Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.


Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 480
Author(s):  
Frank G. Bosman

The story collection known in the West as The Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights, is famous, among other things, for its erotic playfulness. This eroticism was (and is) one of the key reasons for its continuous popularity after Antoine Galland’s French translation in 1704. The Arabian Nights includes, besides traditional, heterosexual acts, play, and desires, examples of homoerotic playfulness—even though we must tread lightly when using such Western concepts with an oriental text body such as this one. The homoerotic playfulness of The Arabian Nights is the subject of this article. By making use of a text-immanent analysis of two of the Nights’ stories—of Qamar and Budûr and of Alî Shâr and Zumurrud—the author of this article focuses on the reversal of common gender roles, acts of cross-dressing, and, of course, homoerotic play. He will argue that these stories provide a narrative safe environment in which the reader is encouraged to “experiment” with non-normative sexual and gender orientations, leaving the dominant status quo effectively and ultimately unchallenged, thus preventing the (self-proclaimed) defenders of that status quo from feeling threatened enough to actively counter-act the experiment.


1987 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 875-883
Author(s):  
Nancy Lipsitt ◽  
Rose R. Olver

The relative contribution of sex and situation has become a contested issue in the understanding of sex differences in behavior. In the present study, 20 male and 20 female undergraduates were asked to describe their behavior and thoughts in six everyday college situations. Three of the situations were constructed to be typically male and three typically female in content. The results indicate that men and women demonstrate sex-specific characteristics in their responses regardless of the type of situation presented. Men exhibited concern with separateness from others, while women exhibited concern with sustaining connection to others, even when faced with situations described to present demand properties that might be expected specifically to elicit the concern characteristic of the other sex. However, for these students the situation also made a difference: female-defined situations elicited the most masculine responses for both male and female subjects.


1956 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. C. Parker

ON March 7, 1936, German troops entered the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. Germany thus violated Articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles and Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty of Locarno of 1925. Remilitarization moved forward for about one hundred miles the areas of concentration for any German armed attack in the west and advanced the defensive line that could be held by the German army. It severely weakened France and, in consequence, all the other powers concerned to maintain the Paris peace settlements and to preserve the peace of Europe.


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