The 20th Century: The Age Of Ethnicity

The 20th century is been called the age of suspicion. Nothing is what it seems, it’s about the lack of trust and believes. There are 3 big figures of this century that talk about suspicion, Darwin, Marx, and Freud. The kid is the best portrait of this suspicion, cause they don’t know everything and they don’t have full control of the world around them. Dorothea Lange is a famous photographer from the 40’s, she went in an intern camp and pictures them. In 17S is peculiar the episode of Rosie washing her body after her sexual awakening. She talks about lather that means both foam and agitation, she wants to erase that experience that somehow makes her dirty. When towards the end she tries to postpone the talk with her mom, it implies that she
The generational gap between 1st and 2nd generation of Japanese is shown when Rosie doesn’t understand the haiku and when the mom asks Rosie not to get married. You can’t ignore the past, you need to know it and eventually get away from it. This is also the story of R’s initiation, with her sexual awakening, with some references to phallic forms and with the symbol of tomatoes. From the essay: Yamamoto talks about violence and men who use it to regain their role of alphas after their emasculation, like in 17S when Mr. Hayashi gets angry. Izzo talks about annihilation, by pursuing what they love, characters end up denying themselves. In the essay many texts are mentioned, like Ms. Sasagawara in which there are metatextual references. Yamamoto mingles Asian American activism and white modernism. She never indulges in exoticism or orientalism, the fascination towards the oriental world. Orientalism is linked to Edward Said. There’s a distinction between victims and guilty party in 17S, the father is guilty of rage but he’s his wife’s victim, for being excluded. Rosie in the story performs the role of other people, she impersonates some British and American
The 80’s are a conservative backlash, they start with Reagan who undermined the social welfare system. On the literary aspect, the 50’s writers tried to write the big American novel, a masterpiece that could represent a whole era and include the whole country, like Hemingway and Faulkner, with imitation and the desire to be representative of the nation. Conformity is a keyword for the 50’s, but not for the 60’s. Writers starts using introspection in their works to keep up with television and radio that were entertaining the audience. There’s the explosion of multiple experiences and differences, minority elites exploded and the focus is on the personal experience. The rise of minority elite happens as a response to social and political challenges. Students wanted more and better educations and colleges met their requests. As a result minorities arose. In Frisco there’s the renaissance (Ginsberg wrote the Howl, inspired by Whitman). In 1966 there was a conference on Deconstruction that is questioning the essence of truth focusing on how language and discourse produce reality. Reality is made up by language. Minimalism is a big deal, their prose is