WORD RESPONSES (ATTN kim woods)
mrharrison
hum_101_week_5_questions.docxWrite 50-75- word responses to each of the following. Please write your responses as complete sentences and include supporting evidence where necessary.
· What does Ellison's protagonist (Reading 36.8) mean when he says he is an "invisible man?"
· Why, according to Woolf (Reading 36.10), did Shakespeare's imaginary sister fail to achieve greatness?
· Offer a brief definition of the term postmodern. Which example from Chapter 37 (art, music, literature, architecture) best exemplifies postmodernism? Explain.
· What is meant by "the global paradigm" in art? Which art or literary work in Chapter 38 best fits this phenomenon? Explain.
Format your responses consistent with APA guidelines. Note: You must use your course text as a reference for this assignment. This means that you should include quoted or paraphrased text from your readings to support your response to, and discussion of, the assignment questions. Course readings should be acknowledged with an in-text citation. If you need additional sources, use the University Library. If you use the Internet to find sources, you should only access credible and reliable Internet sites such as those affiliated with a museum, magazine, newspaper, educational institution, or arts organization, for example. You should not use sites like Wikipedia, About.com, Ask.com, or blogs, for example.
READING 36.8
Q What does Ellison’s protagonist mean
when he says he is “an invisible man”?
READING 36.9
108 CHAPTER 36 Liberation and Equality
experienced by both black and white Americans in the
modern United States.
From Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who 1
haunted Edgar Allan Poe;1 nor am I one of your Hollywoodmovie
ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and
bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a
mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse
to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus
sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of
hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only
my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their
imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. 10
Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical
accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer
occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those
with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of
their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their
physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I
protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen,
although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then
too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor
vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You 20
wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s
minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries
with all his strength to destroy. It’s when you feel like this
that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And,
let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache
with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real
world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you
strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make
them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.
One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps 30
because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an
insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and
demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as
my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue
eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled.
I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head,
butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his
flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled, “Apologize!
Apologize!” But he continued to curse and struggle, and I
butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his 40
knees, profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy
because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy
with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him! And in my outrage I got out
my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath
the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him by the collar
with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth—when it
occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he,
as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare!
And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed
him away, letting him fall back to the street. I stared at him 50
hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness. He lay
there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a
phantom. It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and ashamed. I
was like a drunken man myself, wavering about on weakened
legs. Then I was amused. Something in this man’s thick head
had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I
began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have
awakened at the point of Death? Would Death himself have
freed him for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran away into
the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The 60
next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a
caption stating that he had been “mugged.” Poor fool, poor
blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an
invisible man! . . .
Morrison and Walker In the literature of the black
revolution, especially that of the last three decades of the
twentieth century, many of the most powerful voices were
female. Succeeding such notable Harlem Renaissance
writers as Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and Dorothy
West (1912–1998), two contemporary figures—Toni
Morrison (b. 1931) and Alice Walker (b. 1944)—have
risen to eminence.
Toni Morrison is celebrated as one of the century’s finest
writers. Her novels, rich in epic themes, memorable characters,
and vivid oral rhythms, examine the long-range
consequences of slavery in America. Many of her characters,
Afro-American women, suffer displacement and
despair in their homes and communities. The Pulitzer
Prize-winning Beloved (1988), inspired by the true story of
an African-American slave, is a story of racism’s power to
destroy the natural impulses of human love. In 1993,
Morrison became the first black woman to be honored
with the Nobel Prize in literature.
Alice Walker, whose novel The Color Purple won the
Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1982, is celebrated for her candid
characterizations of black women facing the perils of
racism, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. Her short
story “Elethia” probes the dual issues of identity and liberation
as they come to shape the destiny of a young black
female.
Walker’s “Elethia” (1981)
A certain perverse experience shaped Elethia’s life, and made 1
it possible for it to be true that she carried with her at all
times a small apothecary jar of ashes.
There was in the town where she was born a man whose
ancestors had owned a large plantation on which everything
under the sun was made or grown. There had been many
slaves, and though slavery no longer existed, this grandson of
former slaveowners held a quaint proprietary point of view
where colored people were concerned. He adored them, of
1 A leading American poet, literary critic, and short-story writer (1809–
1849), noted for his tales of terror and his clever detective stories.
Q What
READING 36.10
116 CHAPTER 36 Liberation and Equality
of all working hours, they receive only one-tenth of the
world’s income and own less than one percent of the
world’s property. Though female inequality has been a fact
of history, it was not until the twentieth century that the
quest for female liberation took the form of an international
movement.
The Literature of Feminism: Woolf
The history of feminism (the principle advocating equal
social, political, and economic rights for men and women)
reaches back at least to the fourteenth century, when the
French poet Christine de Pisan took up the pen in defense
of women (see chapter 15). Christine had sporadic followers
among Renaissance and Enlightenment humanists.
The most notable of these was Mary Wollstonecraft
(1759–1797), who published her provocative Vindication of
the Rights of Woman in London in 1792 (see chapter 24).
During the nineteenth century, Condorcet and Mill wrote
reasoned pleas for female equality, as did the female novelist
George Sand (see chapters 28 and 30). In America, the
eloquence of Angelina Grimke (1805–1879) and other suffragettes
(women advocating equality for women) was
instrumental in winning women the right to vote in 1920.
Among the most impassioned advocates of the feminist
movement was the novelist Virginia Woolf
(1882–1941). Woolf argued that equal opportunity for education
and economic advantage were even more important
than the right to vote (British women gained the vote in
1918). In her novels and essays, Woolf proposed that
women could become powerful only by achieving financial
and psychological independence from men. Freedom,
argued Woolf, is the prerequisite for creativity: for a woman
to secure her own creative freedom, she must have money
and the privacy provided by “a room of her own.” The essay
“A Room of One’s Own” voices a response to a clergyman’s
remark that no female could have matched the genius of
William Shakespeare. In the excerpt below, Woolf envisions
Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, Judith, in her sixteenth-
century setting. She uses this fictional character to
raise some challenging questions concerning the psychological
aspects of female creativity.
From Woolf’s “A Room of
One’s Own” (1929)
. . . Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what 1
would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully
gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Shakespeare himself
went, very probably—his mother was an heiress—to the
grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin—Ovid, Virgil
and Horace—and the elements of grammar and logic. He was,
it is well known, a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps
shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done,
to marry a woman in the neighbourhood, who bore him a child
rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek 10
his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the
theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very
soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor,
and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody,
knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising
his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of
the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let
us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as
imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was
not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar 20
and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked
up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and
read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her
to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about
with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but
kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the
conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter—
indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father’s
eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on
the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, 30
however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be
betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried
out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was
severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He
begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this
matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a
fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes.
How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart?
The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a
small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one 40
summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not
seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more
musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like
her brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste
for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to
act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager—a fat,
loose-lipped man—guffawed. He bellowed something about
poodles dancing and women acting—no woman, he said, could
possibly be an actress. He hinted—you can imagine
what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even 50
seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?
Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly
upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways.
At last—for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the
poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded
brows—at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on
her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—
who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart
when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself
one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where 60
the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
. . . any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth
century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or
ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half
witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little
skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had
tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted
and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder
by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her
health and sanity to a certainty. No girl could have walked to 70
Q How does the figure of Shakespeare’s
fictional sister work to make Woolf’s point?
Q How fragile, according to Woolf,
is female creativity?
READING 36.11
CHAPTER 36 Liberation and Equality 117
London and stood at a stage door and forced her way into the
presence of actor-managers without doing herself a violence
and suffering an anguish which may have been irrational—for
chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for
unknown reasons—but were none the less inevitable.
Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a
woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and
instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day
demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in
London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a 80
woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and
dilemma which might well have killed her. Had she survived,
whatever she had written would have been twisted and
deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.
And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there
are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.
That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of
the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even
so late as the nineteenth century. Currer Bell,1 George
Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their 90
writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using
the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention,
which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally
encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be
talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man), that
publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their
blood. . . .
Postwar Feminism: de Beauvoir
The two world wars had a positive effect on the position of
women. In the absence of men during wartime, women
assumed many male jobs in agriculture and in industry. As
Woolf predicted, the newly found financial independence
of women gave them a sense of freedom and stimulated
their demands for legal and social equality. In the Soviet
Union, the communist regime put women to work in
industry and on the battlefields. Women’s roles in other
regions beyond the West were also changing. In China,
where women had been bought and sold for centuries, the
People’s Republic in 1949 closed all brothels, forbade
arranged marriages, and enforced policies of equal pay for
equal work.
Leaders of the feminist movement in the West demanded
psychological independence as well as job equality; their
goals involved raising the consciousness of both sexes. The
new woman must shed her passivity and achieve independence
through responsible action insisted the French novelist,
social critic, and existentialist Simone de Beauvoir
(1908–1986). In the classic feminist text The Second Sex,
de Beauvoir dethroned the “myth of femininity”—the false
and disempowering idea that women possess a unique and
preordained “feminine” essence, which condemns them to
a role of social and intellectual subordination to men.
Reassessing the biological, psychological, and political reasons
for women’s dependency, she concluded that while
Man defines Woman as “the Other” (or second sex), it is
women themselves who complacently accept their subordinate
position. De Beauvoir called on women everywhere
“to renounce all advantages conferred upon them by their
alliance” with men. She pursued this goal (unsuccessfully,
according to some critics) in her own life: her fifty-year
liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre constitutes one of the most
intriguing partnerships of the century. Although both
enjoyed love affairs with other people, they shared a lifelong
marriage of minds.
In the following brief excerpt from The Second Sex,
de Beauvoir explores the nature of female dependency
upon men and the “metaphysical risk” of liberty.
From de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex (1949)
If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes 1
the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this
change. Proletarians say “We”; Negroes also. Regarding
themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the
whites, into “others.” But women do not say “We,” except at
some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration;
men say “women,” and women use the same word in referring
to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective
attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the revolution in
Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are battling for 10
it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been
anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only
what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing,
they have only received.
The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for
organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face
with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no
religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work
and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even
promiscuously herded together in the way that creates 20
community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto
Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of
Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached
through residence, housework, economic condition, and social
standing to certain men— fathers or husbands—more firmly
than they are to other women. If they belong to the
bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with
proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is
to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can
propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently 30
fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole
possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly
Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of
1 Currer Bell was the pseudonym for the British novelist Charlotte
Bronte (1816–1855); for Eliot and Sand, see chapter 28.
Q What circumstances, according to de Beauvoir,
work to make the female “the Other”?
Q Is it still “a world that belongs to men”? (line 61).
118 CHAPTER 36 Liberation and Equality
exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her
oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the
sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male
and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein,1 and
woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity
with two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society
along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the 40
basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which
the two components are necessary to one another. . . .
Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his
slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality.
And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her
situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal
status the same as man’s, and frequently it is much to her
disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognized in
the abstract, long-standing custom prevents their full
expression in the mores. In the economic sphere men and 50
women can almost be said to make up two castes; other things
being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages,
and have more opportunity for success than their new
competitors. In industry and politics men have a great many
more positions and they monopolize the most important posts.
In addition to all this, they enjoy a traditional prestige that the
education of children tends in every way to support, for the
present enshrines the past—and in the past all history has
been made by men. At the present time, when women are
beginning to take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a 60
world that belongs to men— they have no doubt of it at all
and women have scarcely any. To decline to be the Other, to
refuse to be a party to the deal—this would be for women to
renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their
alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will
provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will
undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can
evade at once both economic risk and the metaphysical risk of
a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived
without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of 70
each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also
the temptation to forego liberty and become a thing. This is an
inauspicious road, for he who takes it—passive, lost,
ruined—becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will,
frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value.
But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in
undertaking an authentic existence. When man makes of
woman the Other, he may, then, expect her to manifest deepseated
tendencies toward complicity. Thus, woman may fail to
lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite 80
resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her
to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very
well pleased with her role as the Other. . . .
America’s Feminist Writers
During the 1960s, and especially
in the United States, the struggle
for equality between the sexes
assumed a strident tone. Gender
discrimination in both education
and employment triggered demands for federal legislation
on behalf of women. Even as new types of contraceptives
gave women control over their reproductive functions and
greater sexual freedoms, the campaign to secure legal and
political rights continued, generating protest marches and
a spate of consciousness-raising literature. In 1963, Betty
Friedan (1921–2006) published The Feminine Mystique,
which claimed that American society—and commercial
advertising in particular—had brainwashed women to prefer
the roles of wives and mothers to other positions in life.
Friedan was one of the first feminists to attack the theories
of Sigmund Freud (see chapter 33), especially Freud’s patriarchal
view of women as failed men. She challenged
women to question the existing order and to seek careers
outside the home. With the founding of the National
Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, radical feminists
called for a restructuring of all Western institutions.
Since the 1960s, there has been a virtual renaissance of
poetry and fiction focused on the twin themes of gender
equality and the search for female self-identity. As with the
literature of black liberation, feminist writing often seethes
with repressed rage and anger. Clearly, not all modern literature
written by women addresses exclusively female
issues—contemporary female writers have dealt with subjects
as varied as boxing and the plight of the environment.
Yet, in much of the postwar literature produced by women,
three motifs recur: the victimization of the female, her
effort to define her role in a society traditionally dominated
by men, and her displacement from her ancient role as
goddess and matriarch.
The first generation of feminist poets includes Sylvia
Plath (1932–1963) and Anne Sexton (1928–1975). Plath’s
searing verse reflects her sense of dislocation in male-dominated
society. Much like Plath, Sexton probes problems
related to the socialization of women and the search
for female identity. Deeply confessional, her verse often
reflects upon her own troubled life, which (like Plath’s)
ended in suicide—an ironic fulfillment of Woolf’s prophecy
concerning the fate of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister. In
the autobiographical poem “Self in 1958,” Sexton explores
the images that traditionally have defined women: dolls,
apparel, kitchens, and, finally, herself as an extension of
her mother. Sexton’s poem, which contemplates the
female struggle for self-identity in modern society, recalls
both Nora’s plight in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (see chapter
30) and Woolf’s observation that women “think through
their mothers.”
The African-American poet Sonia Sanchez (b. 1935)
deals with the interrelated questions of racism and identity.
Sanchez’s poetry is more colloquial than Sexton’s, and (like
Baraka’s) it is often fiercely confrontational. In the poem
1 German for “co-existence.” “Woman” Sanchez draws on the literary tradition in which
READING 36.12
READING 38.1
154 CHAPTER 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World
In 1962, the Canadian communications theorist Marshall
McLuhan predicted the electronic transformation of the planet
earth into a “global village.”* In the global village, communication
between geographically remote parts of the world would be
almost instantaneous, and every important new development—
technological, ecological, political, economic, and intellectual—
would affect every villager to some degree. Social and geographic
mobility, receptivity to change, and a sense of collectivity would
be the hallmarks of this new world community. Over the past four
decades, McLuhan’s futuristic vision has become a reality.
The roots of globalism—the promotion of interdependence of
cultures and peoples in all parts of the world—may be found in
the industrial and commercial technologies of the late nineteenth
century. But the single factor that has been most significant in
bringing together all parts of the world is twentieth-century electronic
(and more recently digital) technology. The global community
of the twenty-first century is challenged by some distinct
problems: the effects of globalism on established religious,
national, and ethnic traditions; the future health of the world
ecosystem; and the continuing threat of terrorism. Globalism and
its effects provide the main themes of this chapter. In the arts, the
focus is on the transformative influence of electronic technology
on traditional and untraditional genres. The multiple and often
contradictory messages and styles in the arts of the global
community make our own time one of the most exciting in the history
of the humanistic tradition.
Globalism has become the new model or paradigm for the
contemporary world. While accelerated by electronic technology,
it owes much to a broad array of late twentiethcentury
developments: the success of anticolonial
movements (see chapter 36), the fall of the Berlin Wall
(1989) and subsequent collapse of Soviet communism, and
the end of the cold war (see chapter 36). With the elimination
of these obstacles to freedom of communication
among the populations of the earth, global cultural integration
became a possibility, then a reality. Television was
essential in providing immediate images of international
events, and effective in promoting Western values and
consumer goods. As Western consumer culture took hold
across Asia and the Near East, it met a mixed reception
(with some critics objecting to the “McDonaldization” of
the world). In India and China, its effects were transformative,
while in some parts of the Muslim-occupied Near
East, it was to produce virulent anti-Western antipathy
(with enormous consequences for world peace).
Globalism itself, however, remains an inevitable contemporary
paradigm. In an international best-selling book
entitled The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First
Century (2005), the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Thomas L. Friedman describes a world that has become
metaphorically “flat.” With the collapse of most of the ageold
barriers—physical, historical, and nationalistic—the
global landscape offers a new, level playing field to all who
choose to compete in the international marketplace.
Interlinked networks of computer services, communication
satellites, fiber-optic cables, and work-flow software provide
an untrammeled exchange of data and the free flow of
goods and ideas. These tools continue to transform the
planet into a single world community.
Globalism and Tradition
Many parts of continental Africa have had a difficult time
meeting the challenge of globalism. Following the end of
colonialism and the withdrawal of Western powers from
Africa, a void developed between African traditions and
the Modernist ways of life introduced by the European
presence. Some African states, especially those crippled by
poverty and epidemic disease, have faced serious problems
arising from this void. Power struggles in some African
countries have resulted in the emergence of totalitarian
dictatorships, and age-old ethnic conflicts have been
reignited, all too often resulting in bloody civil wars
(Figure 38.1). Vast parts of Africa are thus caught in the
sometimes devastating struggle between the old ways and
the new.
Africa’s leading English-language writer, Chinua
Achebe (b. 1930), has dealt sensitively with such problems.
In the short story “Dead Men’s Path,” he examines
the warp between premodern and modern traditions and
the ongoing bicultural conflicts that plague many parts of
Africa. At the same time, he probes the elusive, more universal
tensions between tradition and innovation,
between spiritual and secular allegiance, and between
faith and reason—tensions that continue to test human
values in our time.
Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path” (1972)
Michael Obi’s hopes were fulfilled much earlier than he had 1
expected. He was appointed headmaster of Ndume Central
School in January 1949. It had always been an unprogressive
school, so the Mission authorities decided to send a young and
energetic man to run it. Obi accepted this responsibility with
enthusiasm. He had many wonderful ideas and this was an
opportunity to put them into practice. He had had sound
secondary school education which designated him a “pivotal
teacher” in the official records and set him apart from the
other headmasters in the mission field. He was outspoken in 10
* The term was coined by the British Modernist Wyndham Lewis
(1882–1957) in America and Cosmic Man (1948).
CHAPTER 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World 155
his condemnation of the narrow views of these older and often
less-educated ones.
“We shall make a good job of it, shan’t we?” he asked his
young wife when they first heard the joyful news of his
promotion.
“We shall do our best,” she replied. “We shall have such
beautiful gardens and everything will be just modern and
delightful. . . .” In their two years of married life she had
become completely infected by his passion for “modern
methods” and his denigration of “these old and superannuated 20
people in the teaching field who would be better employed as
traders in the Onitsha market.” She began to see herself
already as the admired wife of the young headmaster, the
queen of the school.
The wives of the other teachers would envy her
position. She would set the fashion in everything. . . .
Then, suddenly, it occurred to her that there might not be other
wives. Wavering between hope and fear, she asked her
husband, looking anxiously at him.
“All our colleagues are young and unmarried,” he said with 30
enthusiasm which for once she did not share.
“Which is a good thing,” he continued.
“Why?”
“Why? They will give all their time and energy to the school.”
Nancy was downcast. For a few minutes she became
sceptical about the new school; but it was only for a few
minutes. Her little personal misfortune could not blind her to
her husband’s happy prospects. She looked at him as he sat
folded up in a chair. He was stoop-shouldered and looked frail. 40
But he sometimes surprised people with sudden bursts of
physical energy. In his present posture, however, all his bodily
strength seemed to have retired behind his deep-set eyes,
giving them an extraordinary power of penetration. He was
only twenty-six, but looked thirty or more. On the whole, he
was not unhandsome.
“A penny for your thoughts, Mike,” said Nancy after a
while, imitating the woman’s magazine she read.
“I was thinking what a grand opportunity we’ve got at last
to show these people how a school should be run.” 50
Ndume School was backward in every sense of the word. Mr.
Obi put his whole life into the work, and his wife hers too. He
had two aims. A high standard of teaching was insisted upon,
and the school compound was to be turned into a place of
beauty. Nancy’s dream-gardens came to life with the coming of
the rains, and blossomed. Beautiful hibiscus and allamanda
hedges in brilliant red and yellow marked out the carefully
tended school compound from the rank neighbourhood bushes.
One evening as Obi was admiring his work he was
scandalized to see an old woman from the village hobble right 60
across the compound, through a marigold flowerbed and the
hedges. On going up there he found faint signs of an almost
disused path from the village across the school compound to
the bush on the other side.
“It amazes me,” said Obi to one of his teachers who had
been three years in the school, “that you people allowed the
villagers to make use of this footpath. It is simply incredible.”
He shook his head.
“The path,” said the teacher apologetically, “appears to be
very important to them. Although it is hardly used, it connects 70
the village shrine with their place of burial.”
“And what has that got to do with the school?” asked the
headmaster.
“Well, I don’t know,” replied the other with a shrug of the
shoulders. “But I remember there was a big row some time ago
when we attempted to close it.”
“That was some time ago. But it will not be used now,” said
Obi as he walked away. “What will the Government Education
Officer think of this when he comes to inspect the school next
week? The villagers might, for all I know, decide to use the 80
schoolroom for a pagan ritual during the inspection.”
Heavy sticks were planted closely across the path at the two
places where it entered and left the school premises. These were
further strengthened with barbed wire.
Three days later the village priest of Ani called on the
headmaster. He was an old man and walked with a slight stoop.
He carried a stout walking-stick which he usually tapped on
the floor, by way of emphasis, each time he made a new point
in his argument.
“I have heard,” he said after the usual exchange of 90
cordialities, “that our ancestral footpath has recently been
closed. . . .”
“Yes,” replied Mr. Obi. “We cannot allow people to make a
highway of our school compound.”
“Look here, my son,” said the priest bringing down his
walking-stick, “this path was here before you were born and
before your father was born. The whole life of this village
depends on it. Our dead relatives depart by it and our
ancestors visit us by it. But most important, it is the path of
children coming in to be born. . . .” 100
Mr. Obi listened with a satisfied smile on his face.
“The whole purpose of our school,” he said finally, “is to
eradicate just such beliefs as that. Dead men do not require
footpaths. The whole idea is just fantastic. Our duty is to teach
your children to laugh at such ideas.”
“What you say may be true,” replied the priest, “but we
follow the practices of our fathers. If you re-open the path we
shall have nothing to quarrel about. What I always say is: let
the hawk perch and let the eagle perch.” He rose to go.
“I am sorry,” said the young headmaster. “But the school 110
compound cannot be a thoroughfare. It is against our
regulations. I would suggest your constructing another path,
skirting our premises. We can even get our boys to help in
building it. I don’t suppose the ancestors will find the little
detour too burdensome.”
“I have no more words to say,” said the old priest, already
outside.
Two days later a young woman in the village died in
childbed. A diviner was immediately consulted and he
prescribed heavy sacrifices to propitiate ancestors insulted by
the fence. 120
Obi woke up next morning among the ruins of his work. The
beautiful hedges were torn up not just near the path but right
round the school, the flowers trampled to death and one of the
school buildings pulled down.
. . . That day, the white Supervisor came to inspect the
school and wrote a nasty report on the state of the premises
MAKING CONNECTIONS
156 CHAPTER 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World
The sculptures of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (b. 1944)
reveal the intersection of traditional and contemporary
African themes. Between Earth and Heaven (2006)
consists of thousands of aluminum seals and screw caps
from bottles of wine and liquor (Figure 38.2). The caps
are flattened and woven with copper wire to create
large, shimmering metal tapestries. El Anatsui recycles
discarded objects into compelling artworks whose
designs and colors (gold, red, and black) have much in
common with the decorative cotton-cloth textiles known
as kente (Figure 38.3). The handwoven kente—the name
derives from the designs of baskets traditionally woven
in the kingdom of Asante (modern Ghana)—belong to a
royal textile tradition that reaches back to the eleventh
century. Vibrant in color and complex in their patterns,
these textiles have come to be associated with a
pan-African identity.
Figure 38.2 EL ANATSUI, Between Earth and Heaven, 2006.
Aluminum, copper wire, 91 _ 126 in. Widely regarded as Africa’s most
significant sculptor, El Anatsui teaches at the university of Nigeria.
Figure 38.3 Detail of a Sika Futura (“Gold Dust Aweaneasa”) Asante kente
textile, nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Whole textile 5 ft. 101⁄2 in. _ 5 ft. 11 in.
The individual designs on the cloth are associated with seventeenth-century
Asante kings who are said to have laid claim to specific signs and patterns.
Q How does this story illustrate the conflict
between tradition and innovation?
Q What might the path in
this story symbolize?
The Global Ecosystem
READING 38.2
CHAPTER 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World 157
but more seriously about the “tribal-war situation developing
between the school and the village, arising in part from the
misguided zeal of the new headmaster.”
The future of the environment has become a major global
concern. While modern industry brings vast benefits to
humankind, it also works to threaten the global ecosystem
(the ecological community and its physical environment).
Sulphur dioxide emissions in one part of the world affects
other parts of the world, causing acid rain that damages
forests, lakes, and soil. Industrial pollution poisons the
entire planet’s oceans. Leaks in nuclear reactors endanger
populations thousands of miles from their sites, and greenhouse
gases (produced in part from the burning of the coal,
oil, and natural gas that power the world’s industries), contribute
to global warming and other changes in the earth’s
climate. Although such realities have inspired increasing
concern for the viability of the ecosystem, they have only
recently attracted the serious attention of world leaders.
A landmark figure in the study of ecological systems is
Edward Osborn Wilson (b. 1929). This distinguished
sociobiologist is a leading defender of the natural environment.
His early work in evolutionary biology examined
parallels between ants and other animal societies, including
those of human beings. More recently, he has proposed
a new type of interdisciplinary research (which he calls
“scientific humanism”) that works to improve the human
condition. In The Diversity of Life, Wilson makes a plea for
the preservation of biodiversity, the variation of life forms
within a given ecosystem. He seeks the development of a
sound environmental ethic, shared by both “those who
believe that life was put on earth in one divine stroke,” and
“those who perceive biodiversity to be the product of blind
evolution.” Wilson pleads for a practical ethic that will
ensure the healthy future of the planet.
From Wilson’s The Diversity
of Life (1992)
Every country has three forms of wealth: material, cultural, 1
and biological. The first two we understand well because they
are the substance of our everyday lives. The essence of the
biodiversity problem is that biological wealth is taken much
less seriously. This is a major strategic error, one that will be
increasingly regretted as time passes. Diversity is a potential
source for immense untapped material wealth in the form of
food, medicine, and amenities. The fauna and flora are also
part of a country’s heritage, the product of millions of years
of evolution centered on that time and place and hence as 10
much a reason for national concern as the particularities of
language and culture.
The biological wealth of the world is passing through a
bottleneck destined to last another fifty years or more. The
human population has moved past 5.4 billion, is projected
to reach 8.5 billion by 2025, and may level off at 10 to 15
billion by midcentury. With such a phenomenal increase in
human biomass, with material and energy demands of the
developing countries accelerating at an even faster pace, far
less room will be left for most of the species of plants and 20
animals in a short period of time.
The human juggernaut creates a problem of epic dimensions:
how to pass through the bottleneck and reach midcentury
with the least possible loss of biodiversity and the least
possible cost to humanity. In theory at least, the minimalization
of extinction rates and the minimization of economic costs are
compatible: the more that other forms of life are used and
saved, the more productive and secure will our own species
be. Future generations will reap the benefit of wise decisions
taken on behalf of biological diversity by our generation. 30
What is urgently needed is knowledge and a practical ethic
based on a time scale longer than we are accustomed to apply.
An ideal ethic is a set of rules invented to address problems so
complex or stretching so far into the future as to place their
solution beyond ordinary discourse. Environmental problems
are innately ethical. They require vision reaching
simultaneously into the short and long reaches of time. What is
good for individuals and societies at this moment might easily
sour ten years hence, and what seems ideal over the next
several decades could ruin future generations. To choose 40
what is best for both the near and distant futures is a hard
task, often seemingly contradictory and requiring knowledge
and ethical codes which for the most part are still unwritten.
If it is granted that biodiversity is at high risk, what is to be
done? Even now, with the problem only beginning to come into
focus, there is little doubt about what needs to be done. The
solution will require cooperation among professions long
separated by academic and practical tradition. Biology,
anthropology, economics, agriculture, government, and law will
have to find a common voice. Their conjunction has 50
already given rise to a new discipline, biodiversity studies,
defined as the systematic study of the full array of organic
diversity and the origin of that diversity, together with the
methods by which it can be maintained and used for the
benefit of humanity. The enterprise of biodiversity studies is
thus both scientific, a branch of pure biology, and applied, a
branch of biotechnology and the social sciences. It draws
from biology at the level of whole organisms and populations in
the same way that biomedical studies draw from biology at the
level of the cell and molecule. . . . 60
The evidence of swift environmental change calls for an ethic
uncoupled from other systems of belief. Those committed by
religion to believe that life was put on earth in one divine stroke
will recognize that we are destroying the Creation, and those
who perceive biodiversity to be the product of blind evolution
will agree. Across the other great philosophical divide, it does
not matter whether species have independent rights or,
conversely, that moral reasoning is uniquely a human 70
Q How does Dillard picture humankind’s
place in the natural world?
Q To what does she attribute
modern “faithlessness”?
Q Why does Wilson contend that environmental
problems are “innately ethical”?
Q Why does he regard “the stewardship of
environment” as a global responsibility?
READING 38.3
158 CHAPTER 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World
or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized
atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that. No claims of
any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single
giraffe.
The question from agnosticism is, Who turned on the lights?
The question from faith is, Whatever for? . . . .
Sir James Jeans, British astronomer and physicist, 30
suggested that the universe was beginning to look more like a
great thought than a great machine. Humanists seized on the
expression, but it was hardly news. We knew, looking around,
that a thought branches and leafs, a tree comes to a
conclusion. But the question of who is thinking the thought is
more fruitful than the question of who made the machine, for
a machinist can of course wipe his hands and leave, and his
simple machine still hums; but if the thinker’s attention strays
for a minute, his simplest thought ceases altogether. And, as I
have stressed, the place where we so incontrovertibly find 40
ourselves, whether thought or machine, is at least not in any
way simple.
Environmental Art
What Wilson calls “the stewardship of environment” has
captured the imagination of some contemporary visual
artists. Robert Smithson (1938–1973), for instance, pioneered
one of the most important ecological landmarks of
the late twentieth century, the piece known as Spiral Jetty
(Figure 38.4). Constructed on the edge of the Great Salt
Lake in Utah, in waters polluted by abandoned oil mines,
Spiral Jetty is a giant (1500 foot-long) coil consisting of 6650
tons of local black basalt, limestone, and earth. This snaillike
symbol of eternity makes reference to ancient earthworks,
such as those found in Neolithic cultures (see Figure
3.10), and to the origins of life in the salty waters of the primordial
ocean; but it also calls attention to the way in
which nature is constantly transforming the environment
and its ecological balance.
When Smithson created Spiral Jetty in 1970, the lake was
unusually shallow because of drought. Submerged twice by
rising waters, the piece can now be seen again from ground
level, its galactic coil partially encrusted with white salt
crystals that float in the algae-filled rose-colored shallows.
Earthworks like Spiral Jetty are often best appreciated from
the air. Tragically, it was in the crash of a small airplane surveying
a potential site that Smithson was killed.
Green Architecture
Architects have always given practical consideration to
the environment in which they build. Now, however, in
the face of rising fuel prices, global warming, and the degradation
of the ecosystem due to industrial growth, the job of
designing structures that do the least possible damage to
concern. Defenders of both premises seem destined to
gravitate toward the same position on conservation.
The stewardship of the environment is a domain on the near
side of metaphysics where all reflective persons can surely
find common ground. For what, in the final analysis, is morality
but the command of conscience seasoned by a rational
examination of consequences? And what is a fundamental
precept but one that serves all generations? An enduring
environmental ethic will aim to preserve not only the health and
freedom of our species, but access to the world in which 80
the human spirit was born.
The poets Gary Snyder (b. 1930) and Annie Dillard
(b. 1943) share Wilson’s concerns for the natural environment.
To essays and poems inspired in part by her love for
Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Dillard brings a dimension
of awe that has been called “ecospirituality.” A
Roman Catholic convert whose outlook is essentially pantheistic,
Dillard tests the objective facts of nature against
her mystical appreciation of its wonders. An excerpt from
her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
exemplifies the voice of the poet whose concerns are at
once personal and global.
From Dillard’s Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek (1974)
. . . . Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The 1
surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is
smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone
a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and
hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for even after the
atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of
disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the
molecules’ loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as
fringed and intricate as the shape of the air in time. Forays
into mystery cut bays and fine fiords, but the forested 10
mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most
filigreed fringe of detail. “Every religion that does not affirm
that God is hidden,” said Pascal flatly, “is not true.”
What is man, that thou are mindful of him? This is where the
great modern religions are so unthinkably radical: the love of
God! For we can see that we are as many as the leaves of
trees. But it could be that our faithlessness is a cowering
cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of
imagination. Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding
radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its
common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the 20
world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock-intrade.
The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had
been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination
Science and Technology
the environment (a practice known as “green” or “sustainable”
design), has become even more imperative. Green buildings—
structures that are both friendly to the ecosystem and energy
efficient—have been found to save money and preserve the
environment. Although the United States launched the
Green Building Council in 2000, fewer than 800 certified
green buildings were constructed during the following seven
years; however, the greening of architecture has become a
global movement. It embraces architectural design that makes
use of energy-efficient (and renewable) building materials,
recycling systems that capture rainwater (for everyday use),
solar panels that use sunlight to generate electricity, insulating
glass, and other energy-saving devices and techniques.
Of the green buildings that have been constructed in the
last ten years, one has already become a landmark: the Swiss
Re office building (30 St. Mary Axe), designed in 2003 by the
British architect Norman Foster (b. 1935), is London’s first
environmentally sustainable skyscraper (Figure 38.5). Natural
ventilation, provided by windows that open automatically,
passive solar heating, and a double-glazed insulating glass skin
(some 260,000 square feet of glass) are some of the features
that work to reduce this forty-story building’s energy costs by
one-half of normal costs. While Foster’s tower resembles a
spaceship, its tall rounded picklelike shape has inspired
Londoners to call it “the Gherkin.”
1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring argues that
man-made chemicals are damaging the
earth’s ecosystem
1974 American scientists demonstrate that
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are eroding
the earth’s ozone layer
2006 Al Gore publishes An Inconvenient Truth:
The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming
and What We Can Do About It
Figure 38.4 ROBERT SMITHSON,
Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah,
1970. Rock, salt crystals, earth
algae; coil 1500 ft. The lake itself
had been degraded by abandoned
oil derricks. Documentary drawings,
photographs, and films of Spiral
Jetty, along with the recent
rehabilitation of the earthwork
itself, have heightened public
awareness of the fragile balance
between nature and culture.
Figure 38.5 NORMAN FOSTER, Swiss Re building
(30 St. Mary Axe), London, 2003.
Globalism and Ethnic Identity
160 CHAPTER 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World
Ethnic identity—that is, one’s bond to a group that shares
the same cultural traditions, culture, and values—is a
major theme in the global perspective. A “cluster” of traits
(race, language, physical appearance, and religious values)
that form one’s self-image, ethnicity also differentiates the
self from mass culture. The self-affirming significance of
ethnic identity is apparent in the ancient Yoruba proverb:
“I am because we are; what I am is what we are.”
Ethnicity manifests itself in language, music, food, and
ritual. Efforts to define and maintain ethnic identity have
inspired many contemporary writers. In her poems, novels,
and short stories, Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948) draws on
the Pueblo folklore of her Native American ancestors; the
Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston (b.
1940) blends fiction and nonfiction in novels that deal
with family legends and native Chinese customs. The oral
tradition—stories handed down from generation to generation,
often by and through women—plays an important
part in the works of these authors, even as it does in the
formation of ethnic identity.
Ethnicity has also become a theme in the visual arts.
We have seen earlier in this chapter evidence of one
African artist’s homage to his ethnic identity (see Figure
38.2). Other examples occur in the visual arts, especially
photography and film. The latter are the favorite media of
Iranian-born Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), who now lives in
New York City. Neshat’s art deals with conflicting ethnic
values and lifestyles: Islamic and Western, ancient and
modern, male and female. Her photographic series, Women
of Allah (1993–1997) explores the role of militant women
who fought in the 1979 revolution that overthrew Iran’s
ruling dynasty. Neshat makes dramatic use of the chador
(the large veil of black cloth that has become an ethnic
symbol of Muslim women) to frame her face, which, intersected
by a rifle, becomes the site of a poem (by the feminist
writer Forough Farrokhzad, 1935–1967) transcribed in
Farsi calligraphy (Figure 38.6).
Latino Culture
The process of globalization and the rise of ethnicity have
accelerated yet another major phenomenon: immigration—
the age-old process of people moving from mother
country to other country—has increased dramatically in
recent years. Every year, some 100 million people leave (or
try to leave) their places of birth in search of political or
economic advantage. This mass migration of peoples has
resulted in the establishment of large ethnic communities
throughout the world. The vast numbers of immigrants
who have made the United States their home have had a
dramatic impact: demographic changes, in the form of rising
numbers of Asians and Latinos—persons from the various
Latin American countries—have changed the face of
the economy, the urban environment, and the culture. If
current trends continue, by the year 2050 Latinos will constitute
30 percent of the population in the United States.
In all aspects of life, from literature and art to food and
dance styles, there has been a flowering of Latino culture.
With The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), the first
novel by a Hispanic to win the Pulitzer Prize, the Cuban-
American Oscar Hijuelos (b. 1951) brought attention to
the impact of Latin American music on American culture,
and, more generally, to the role of memory in reclaiming
one’s ethnic roots. Younger writers have given voice to personal
problems of adjustment in America’s ethnic mosaic
and to the ways in which language and customs provide a
vital sense of ethnic identity. These are the themes pursued
by one of today’s leading Chicana (Mexican-American
female) authors, Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954). Cisneros, who
describes the struggle of Chicana women in an alien society,
writes in the familiar voice of everyday speech. Of her
writing style, she says:
It’s very much of an anti-academic voice—a child’s
voice, a girl’s voice, a poor girl’s voice, a spoken
voice, the voice of an American Mexican. It’s in
this rebellious realm of antipoetics that I tried to
create a poetic text with the most unofficial
language I could find.
Cisneros dates the birth of her own political consciousness
from the moment (in a graduate seminar on Western literature)
she recognized her “otherness,” that is, her separateness
from the dominant culture. A vignette from The
House on Mango Street, her classic novel, describes the
Figure 38.6 SHIRIN NESHAT, Rebellious Silence, from “Women of Allah”
series, 1994. Gelatin-silver print and ink.
READING 38.4
Q How does Cisneros bring Mamacita to life?
What makes her a sympathetic figure?
experience of a young girl growing up in the Latino section
of Chicago. It illustrates the shaping role of language and
memory in matters of identity.
Cisneros’ “No Speak English”
from The House on
Mango Street (1984)
Mamacita1 is the big mama of the man across the street,- 1
third-floor front. Rachel says her name ought to be Mamasota,2
but I think that’s mean.
The man saved his money to bring her here. He saved and
saved because she was alone with the baby boy in that
country. He worked two jobs. He came home late and he left
early. Every day.
Then one day Mamacita and the baby boy arrived in a yellow
taxi. The taxi door opened like a waiter’s arm. Out stepped a
tiny pink shoe, a foot soft as a rabbit’s ear, then 10
the thick ankle, a flutter of hips, fuchsia roses and green
perfume. The man had to pull her, the taxicab driver had to
push. Push, pull. Push, pull. Poof!
All at once she bloomed. Huge, enormous, beautiful to look
at, from the salmon-pink feather on the tip of her hat down to
the little rosebuds of her toes. I couldn’t take my eyes off her
tiny shoes.
Up, up, up the stairs she went with the baby boy in a blue
blanket, the man carrying her suitcases, her lavender hatboxes,
a dozen boxes of satin high heels. Then we didn’t 20
see her.
Somebody said because she’s too fat, somebody because
of the three flights of stairs, but I believe she doesn’t come
out because she is afraid to speak English, and maybe this is
so since she only knows eight words. She knows to say: He not
here for when the landlord comes, No speak English if
anybody else comes, and Holy smokes. I don’t know where she
learned this, but I heard her say it one time and it surprised me.
My father says when he came to this country he ate 30
hamandeggs for three months. Breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Hamandeggs. That was the only word he knew. He doesn’t eat
hamandeggs anymore.
Whatever her reasons, whether she is fat, or can’t climb
the stairs, or is afraid of English, she won’t come down. She
sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show
and sings all the homesick songs about her country in a voice
that sounds like a seagull.
Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink
house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man 40
paints the walls of the apartment pink, but it’s not the same,
you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think
she cries. I would.
Sometimes the man gets disgusted. He starts screaming
and you can hear it all the way down the street.
Ay, she says, she is sad.
Oh, he says. Not again.
¿Cuándo, cuándo, cuándo? 3 she asks.
¡Ay, caray! 4 We are home. This is home. Here I am and
here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ! 50
¡Ay, Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while
lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny
thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country.
And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has
begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on
T.V.
No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in
the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak
English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can’t
believe here ears. 60
No less than in literature, the visual arts document the
Latino effort to preserve or exalt ethnic identity: Yolanda
Lopez (b. 1942) appropriates a popular Latin American
icon of political resistance—the Virgin of Guadalupe (see
Figure 20.2). She transforms the Mother of God into the
autobiographical image of an exuberant marathon athlete
outfitted in track shoes and star-studded cape (redolent of
both Our Lady and Wonder Woman, Figure 38.7).
1 ”Little Mama,” also a term of endearment.
2 ”Big Mama.”
3 ”When?”
4 An exclamation, loosely: “Good grief.”
Figure 38.7 YOLANDA M. LÓPEZ, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin
of Guadalupe, part 3 from the “Guadalupe Triptych,” 1978. Oil pastel
on paper, 30 _ 24 in.
READING 38.5
The popular history of Latino culture also served as
inspiration for Luis Jimenez (1940–2007). Born to
Mexican parents in El Paso, Texas, Jimenez constructs lifesized,
brightly colored fiberglass sculptures. These call
attention to Mexican contributions to American culture
and to the ongoing problems related to the migration of
thousands of Mexicans across the United States/Mexican
border. The 10-foot-high, totemlike sculpture called Border
Crossing (Cruzando El Rio Bravo) evokes the heroic
Mexican view of the crossing as a rite of passage heralding
a transformation in status and lifestyle (Figure 38.8).
Ethnic Conflict
The exercise of ethnic identity has become a powerful
social and political force in the global perspective. Having
cast off the rule of foreign powers and totalitarian ideologies,
ethnic peoples have sought to reaffirm their primary
affiliations—to return to their spiritual roots. “Identity politics,”
the exercise of power by means of group solidarity,
has—in its more malignant guise—pitted ethnic groups
against each other in militant opposition. In Africa, the
Middle East, the Balkans, the Indian subcontinent, and
the former Soviet Union, efforts to revive or maintain
ethnic identity have coincided with the bitter and often
militant quest for solidarity and political autonomy.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing conflict
between Palestinians and Israelis who lay claims to the
same ancient territories of the Middle East. Hostilities
between the Arab (and essentially Muslim) population of
Palestine and the Jewish inhabitants of Israel preceded the
establishment of an independent Jewish state in 1947.
However, these have become more virulent in the past few
decades, and the move toward peaceful compromise has
only just begun.
The life of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish
(1942–2008) was one of displacement and exile. Born to
Sunni Muslim parents in a Palestinian village that was
destroyed by Israel in 1948, Darwish lived in dozens of
cities across the globe. Holding the bizarre status of a
“present-absent alien,” however, he remained a refugee
from his homeland. Regarded by Palestinians as their poet
laureate, this “poet in exile” published some twenty volumes
of verse. His passion to redeem his lost homeland is
expressed in a simple, yet eloquent, style illustrated in the
poem “Earth Presses Against Us.”
Darwish’s Israeli counterpart, Yehuda Amichai
(1924–2000) was born in Germany but moved to Palestine
in 1936. Raised as an Orthodox Jew amidst Israel’s turbulent
struggle to become a state, Amichai began writing
poetry in 1948. Israel’s favorite poet takes as his themes the
roles of memory, homeland, and religious faith. His poem,
“The Resurrection of the Dead,” looks beyond the immediacy
of ethnic turmoil to consider both the weight of past
history and the promise of the future.
The Poems of Darwish
and Amichai
Darwish’s “Earth Presses Against Us” (2003)
Earth is pressing against us, trapping us in the final passage. 1
To pass through, we pull off our limbs.
Earth is squeezing us. If only we were its wheat, we might die
and yet live.
If only it were our mother so that she might temper us with mercy.
If only we were pictures of rocks held in our dreams like mirrors.
We glimpse faces in their final battle for the soul, of those who
will be killed
by the last living among us. We mourn their children’s feast. 10
We saw the faces of those who would throw our children out
of the windows
of this last space. A star to burnish our mirrors.
Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly
after the last sky?
Where should plants sleep after the last breath of air?
We write our names with crimson mist!
We end the hymn with our flesh.
Here we will die. Here, in the final passage.
Here or there, our blood will plant olive trees. 20
Figure 38.8 LUIS JIMÉNEZ, Border Crossing (Cruzando El Rio Bravo), 1989.
Fiberglass with urethane finish, 10 ft. 7 in. _ 4 ft. 6 in. _ 4 ft. 6 in. The artist
dedicated this piece to his father, who entered the United States legally in 1924.
Q How does each of these poets deal
with history, memory, and hope?
Q Why do you think there is no mention
of religion in either poem?
The Challenge of Globalism
READING 38.6
CHAPTER 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World 163
Amichai’s “The Resurrection of the Dead” (2004)
We are buried below with everything we did, 1
with our tears and our laughs.
We have made storerooms of history out of it all,
galleries of the past, and treasure houses,
buildings and walls and endless stairs of iron and marble
in the cellars of time.
We will not take anything with us.
Even plundering kings, they all left something here.
Lovers and conquerors, happy and sad,
they all left something here, a sign, a house, 10
like a man who seeks to return to a beloved place
and purposely forgets a book, a basket, a pair of glasses,
so that he will have an excuse to come back to the beloved place.
In the same way we leave things here.
In the same way the dead leave us.
(Translated, from the Hebrew, by Leon Wieseltier.)
Terrorism
Probably the greatest single threat to the global community
is terrorism, the deliberate and systematic use of violence
against civilians in order to achieve political, religious, or
ideological goals. As a combat tactic, terrorism is not new;
however, rapid forms of communication and transportation,
and the availability of more virulent weaponry make
contemporary terrorism both imminent and politically
devastating. Terrorist attacks have taken place all over the
world, from Madrid to Mumbai. One of the most ruthless
involved a coordinated assault on New York’s World Trade
Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. On
September 11, 2001, Islamic militants representing the
radical Muslim group known as al-Qaeda (“the base”)
hijacked four American airliners, flying two of them into
the twin towers in Manhattan, and a third into the headquarters
of the U. S. Department of Defense near the
nation’s capital. A fourth crashed before it could reach its
target: the White House.
Masterminded by al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden
(b. 1957), the attack, now called “9-11,” killed more than
3000 civilians. Bin Laden justified the operation as retaliation
for America’s military presence and eco-political
interference in the predominantly Muslim regions of the
Middle East. Terrorist assaults on other primarily Western
targets throughout the world underline the troubling rift
between the ideology of radical Islamists defending strict
Qur’anic theocracy and the (largely) Western ideology of
democratic capitalism. Eighteen months after 9-11, on suspicions
of an Iraqi stockpile of chemical and biological
weapons, a multinational coalition force invaded Iraq; that
military intervention, which led to armed conflict between
Shiite and Sunni factions, has complicated the already
tense situation in the Middle East. The war on terror currently
continues in other regions, such as Afghanistan,
where militant Sunni insurgents known as the Taliban
threaten to create a new form of Islamic radicalism.
Initially, artists responded to the events of 9-11 by commemorating
the destruction of the World Trade Center
and those who died in the assault. One year after the
attack, the American composer John Adams (whom we
met in chapter 37) premiered his choral eulogy, On the
Transmigration of Souls, which was awarded the 2003
Pulitzer Prize in music. Numerous photographs and films
revisit the event, some of which (picturing those who
jumped from the burning towers) are painful and powerful.
Literary reflection on the atrocity and its aftermath
inspired Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2006) and Laurence
Wright’s carefully researched study, The Looming Tower:
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 (2007). However, the realities
of international terrorism are addressed more broadly
in the poems of two contemporary writers: the Nobel Prizewinning
poet Wislawa Szymborska (b. 1923) and the
acclaimed Irish poet Seamus Heaney (b. 1939).
Szymborska has lived most of her life in communistcontrolled
Poland, a country that lost nearly one-fifth of its
population during World War II. Her poems, while
straightforward and conversational in tone, address personal
and universal subjects and matters of moral urgency.
“The Terrorist, He Watches,” written in 1976, is a prescient
anticipation of our current unease and insecurity.
Seamus Heaney shares with his countryman W. B.
Yeats (see chapter 34) the gift of lyric brilliance. Heaney’s
ability to translate the small details of everyday experience
into transcendent ideas is unsurpassed. While much
of his poetry reflects his deep affection for the “bogs and
barnyards” of rural life, his most recent volume of poetry,
District and Circle, responds to the violence of our time,
specifically the 2005 terrorist attacks on the District and
Circle lines of London’s subway system. Prompted by the
Roman poet Horace, Heaney grapples with sobering,
global uncertainties.
Szymborska’s “The Terrorist,
He Watches” (1976)
The bomb will explode in the bar at twenty past one. 1
Now it’s only sixteen minutes past.
Some will still have time to enter,
some to leave.
The terrorist’s already on the other side. 5
That distance protects him from all harm
and, well, it’s like the pictures:
A woman in a yellow jacket, she enters.
A man in dark glasses, he leaves.
Boys in jeans, they’re talking. 10
Sixteen minutes past and four seconds.
Q What does this poem suggest about the life
of the individual in the global village?
READING 38.7
Q How does the poet’s use of ancient
mythology contribute to the poem?
164 CHAPTER 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World
The smaller one, he’s lucky, mounts his scooter,
but that taller chap, he walks in.
Seventeen minutes and forty seconds.
A girl, she walks by, a green ribbon in her hair. 15
But that bus suddenly hides her.
Eighteen minutes past.
The girl’s disappeared.
Was she stupid enough to go in, or wasn’t she.
We shall see when they bring out the bodies. 20
Nineteen minutes past.
No one else appears to be going in.
On the other hand, a fat bald man leaves.
But seems to search his pockets and
at ten seconds to twenty past one 25
he returns to look for his wretched gloves.
It’s twenty past one.
Time, how it drags.
Surely, it’s now.
No, not quite. 30
Yes, now.
The bomb, it explodes.
Heaney’s “Anything Can Happen”
(2005)
After Horace, Odes, I, 34
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter1
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,2
the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.3
Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.
Telluric4 ash and fire-spores boil away.
China: Global Ascendance
It is widely believed that the People’s Republic of China
will be the next great global power. In the last three
decades, China has experienced a cultural transformation
of enormous proportions. Once a country of rural villages,
this vast nation now claims more than 150 cities with a
population of one million or more people in each. Still
governed by a communist regime, its rapid advances in
industry, technology, and the arts have made it a formidable
presence on the global stage.
China’s ascendance has not been unmarred by internal
strife. Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 (see
chapter 34), communist officials tightened control over
all forms of artistic expression. Nevertheless, young
Chinese artists and writers continued to work, either in
exile or at their own peril. In June 1989, at Tiananmen
Square in Beijing, thousands of student activists demonstrated
in support of democratic reform. With Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony blaring from loudspeakers, demonstrators
raised a plaster figure of the goddess of democracy
modeled on the Statue of Liberty. The official response to
this overt display of freedom resulted in the massacre of
some protesters and the imprisonment of others. Since
Tiananmen Square, literary publication has remained
under the watchful eye of the state, but efforts to control
music and the visual arts have been relaxed. A large body
of Chinese literature, much of it written by women, has
examined the traumatic years of Mao’s Cultural
Revolution (1966–1976). The enormous popularity of
Western classical music in China has created a talent pool
of highly trained performers. Outstanding filmmakers,
such as Jia Zhang-ke and Zhang Yimou (see chapter 37)
have received worldwide attention. Even more dramatic is
the upsurge in painting and sculpture, where the Chinese
have broken into the world art market with works that
depart radically from Chinese tradition (and command
huge prices in the Western art market).
In the past three decades, artists—most of them rigorously
trained in China’s Central Academy—have had the
opportunity to explore the major styles and techniques of
their Western contemporaries, a phenomenon made possible
by international travel and mass electronic communication.
In the early 1990s, there emerged two overlapping
(and still flourishing) styles. The first, political pop, seizes on
Western icons and images to glamorize or discredit various
aspects of Chinese life. The second, cynical realism, engages
commercial painting techniques to satirize social and political
issues. Both of these styles are evident in the “Great
Criticism” series by Wang Guangyi (b. 1956).
In one painting from the series (Figure 38.9), bright colors
and broad, simplified shapes, reminiscent of the communist-
approved posters of the 1920s (see Figure 34.5),
serve a sly and subversive end. Three Maoist workers,
armed with the red flag of China, whose mast is an oversized
pen, advance boldly into the arena of commercial
combat, their mission approved by the official government
stamps stenciled on the surface of the canvas. Here, collectivist
socialism engages capitalist consumerism, represented
1 Roman sky god.
2 River in the underworld crossed by the souls of the dead.
3 Mythic Titan condemned to support the heavens on his shoulders.
4 Terrestrial.
by such populist commodities as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s
hamburgers, and Marlboro cigarettes.
More recently, the Chinese art scene has exploded with
elaborately choreographed installations and mixed-media
sculptures. The Chinese-born Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957)
moved to Manhattan in 1995, bringing with him the ageold
traditions of his homeland. Trained in stage design at
the Shanghai Drama Institute, Cai creates public works
that capture the disquieting nature of contemporary life.
Many of his works explore the properties of gunpowder—an
explosive invented by the Chinese for firework
displays.
Cai’s most ambitious work is a four-part installation
called Inopportune. The first stage of the
piece features a brilliant array of colored lights
pulsing from long transparent rods that burst from
nine identical Ford sedans (Figure 38.10). The
cars, suspended in midair along a 300-foot gallery,
call to mind a sequence of images unfurling in a
Chinese scroll, or a series of frozen film frames.
Stage Two, installed in an adjacent gallery, consists
of nine prefabricated life-sized tigers pierced
by hundreds of bamboo arrows—a reference to a
popular thirteenth-century Chinese tale glorifying
a hero who saves his village from a man-eating
tiger. Stage Three is a startling ninety-second
film loop (projected on a huge screen); here, a
phantom car (filled with fireworks) bursts silently
into flames, then floats in a dreamlike manner
through Manhattan’s bustling, nocturnal Times
Square. The fourth and final part of the installation
is a two-dimensional wall-hanging on which
one sees nine exploding cars as “painted” by ignited
gunpowder. In this project Cai has mixed an
assortment of traditions, symbols, and images to
capture the violence of contemporary urban life. He claims
that he uses the tools and materials of destruction and terror
for healing purposes—the Chinese character for “gunpowder”
translates literally as “fire medicine,” which was
once thought to cure the ailing body.
The building boom that China has enjoyed in the last
decade was markedly accelerated by Beijing’s role as the
site of the 2008 Olympics. Representative of the global
perspective, the architectural projects for the Olympics
involved multinational participation and cooperation: the
extraordinary Beijing airport—now the largest in the
world—was the brainchild of the British architect,
Norman Foster (discussed earlier in this chapter); the
National Stadium (nicknamed the “Bird’s Nest” to
describe its interwoven steel latticework) was designed by Figure 38.10 CAI GUO-QIANG, Inopportune, Stage 1, 2005. Mixed media.
