I weighed 87.4 kilos before breakfast.
At 9:45 I logged on for what will hopefully be our last Zoom class. Zoom sent me a .exe file but I didn’t think I needed it since I’d already signed in. But I waited until after 10:00 and the room still hadn’t opened up, so I figured that I had to install Zoom Client for every device and since this is a new computer, I installed it. It looks like that was the problem because the room opened right away after that.
We had two presentations today.
Georgia presented on Season of Migration to the North.
Tayeb Salih was born in 1929. He wrote about the struggle between east and west. His novel was initially banned in Muslim countries because it was considered pornographic and counter to Islam, but now the ban has been lifted.
From what I’ve read the ban was lifted in Sudan but it’s still banned in Egypt and some other Islamic countries. To be fair, Canada Customs was censoring and confiscating certain literature up until 2000.
The narrator feels the same sense of alienation as Sa’eed. His locked room is a shrine to his life in England. She draws parallels between Sa'eed and Othello. Both Othello and Sa’eed break boundaries. She says Othello kills Desdemona because of the influence of the west. I don’t agree that that is obviously true. Mustafa says, "I am not Othello" and so that implies there is no parallel. I argue that Othello’s self-doubts and jealousies could have been manipulated by someone like Iago even if he’d never left his native region. Everyone in the play could have been of the same ethnicity and the same result would have occurred.
The narrator mistakes his own reflection for a picture of Sa’eed. His defiant English wife Jean represents the west.
Georgia says Modernism only benefits the upper class, but I think she means "modernization".
I tried to ask Georgia a question, but my mic wasn’t working. I switched USB ports and later tried to speak to Apala but it still didn’t work. When class was over, I checked my mic with the voice recorder and it worked fine so the problem must have been with Zoom.
Apala said we will get our Keyword assignments back tonight. She says the average was high. She’s marking more harshly so if we are doing well this is a good sign for the rest of our assignments.
Freya did her presentation on the same topic but also on the Friedman essay.
The ideology of European diffusionism says Europe advances and the others follow.
Wallerstein says modernity is a western virus erasing cultures. But there are modernizing forces in every culture. Sa’eed is stripped of moral agency because he is a colonial victim. Like in Heart of Darkness it is implied there was no law in Africa before Europeans brought it. Mustafa’s murder trial becomes more of an ideological battle than one about the murder of an English woman.
The core-periphery distinction should be done away with. The masks that influenced cubism are on the periphery but really, they are the early centre of cubism. Modernizers are not necessarily influenced by Europe, for example, Mustafa’s widow.
I think it would be impossible for Mustafa’s widow to have not been influenced by European or North American modernity regarding women’s liberation. This novel is set in the 1960s and she would have had to have lived in a vacuum to not be affected by Western Feminism. Even if she’d only heard one popular song from the west, she would have been influenced to at least some small extent by Western modernity. One very popular song in Sudan in 1963 was Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack”, which features his backup singers The Raelettes singing the words of a woman taking control and kicking a man out of her life and home.
Apala talks of the similarity between Marxist critique of modernism and that of neo-conservativism. Marxism says there is uneven development. Technology’s aim is the technologization of all the planet. But economies respond differently. Freya says modernity creates a distinction and then separates itself from it.
Apala says Friedman’s article at the end says Season of Migration to the North could be seen as a global transnationalist novel and high modernism. Of dialectical bonding, Salih refuses binaries but only refuses them as complete. They feed off one another.
Apala says she has written an article on Season of Migration to the North and might upload it. Anand and Conrad engage with binaries but Salih says east and west are never anything but antagonistic to one another. The relationship is essentially one of conflict but she thinks he means that’s productive.
Agonism defines a love-hate relationship that is different from antagonism. This plays out in the novel. Indigenization and agonism are similar.
The weak point in Friedman’s essay is how she defines modernity. She asks us to comment on this on the Discussion board. Friedman says modernism is polycentric but talks about modernist expression.
I weighed 86.2 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor and on the way home along Queen I stopped at Freshco. All the grapes were too soft and so I didn’t buy any. The green ones I have will last until I go to No Frills on Saturday. I bought two pints of strawberries, several avocadoes, a bunch of broccoli, a carton of chocolate soymilk, a few different kinds of canned beans: kidney, black-eyed, garbanzo, and lima; a bag of frozen lima beans, and a bag of green pea crisps.
I weighed 87.4 kilos at 18:00.
I finished editing my lecture notes and worked on my Discussion board comment. Other than what I’ve already written, Apala had asked us to comment on Friedman’s definition of Modernism:
Friedman sees “modernism as the expressive dimension of modernity, one that encompasses a range of styles among creative forms that share family resemblances based on an engagement with the historical conditions of modernity in a particular location.” I don’t agree that Modernism merely expresses modernity. For Modernism to be Modernist art it must contain a tension between both embracing and resisting modernity. As far as what she says about centre and periphery, certainly, every Modernism must find its own centre but the modernity from which it creates its centre may not be entirely its own. Take the example of Mustafa’s widow as a “modern” woman. I think it would be impossible for her to have not been influenced by European or North American modernity regarding women’s liberation. This novel is set in the 1960s and she would have had to have lived in a vacuum to not be affected by Western Feminism. Even if she’d only heard one popular song from the west, she would have been influenced to at least some small extent by Western modernity. This still centres that modernity in the West and there are many more modernities that have the same undeniable Western centre.
I had a potato with steamed frozen peas and gravy while watching an episode of Astro Boy.
This story centres on a car race around the world. Tommy Speed’s Silver Comet has won the race for the last two years but this year a gangster wants the car that he owns to win. He sends two thugs to Tommy’s garage and they sabotage his car on the night before the race. Tommy asks Dr. Elefun for help and he says the body can be repaired but the robot brain of the car is irreplaceable. But then he changes his mind and asks Astro Boy to lend his brain to the car for the duration of the race. Astro Boy agrees but that night Tommy’s sister Twin Tails comes to reveal something to Elefun and Astro Boy. The next day the race is about to begin and everyone expects The Silver Comet to be out of the race, but it arrives at the last minute. After the race starts the gangster has his men plant a bomb in Tommy’s path but Astro Boy swoops in and grabs it, throwing it to explode at a safe distance. Then Astro Boy captures the thugs. Tommy is surprised to see Astro Boy because his brain is supposed to be inside of his car. Astro Boy explains that it turns out that Tommy’s sister Twin Tails is really a robot created by Tommy’s father. She asked them to put her brain inside the car and that’s why it’s running better than ever. But the gangster hasn’t given up and his man Stripes has set a trap in the Caucasus Mountains. As the Silver Comet is speeding along the road opens and swallows it. In the gangster’s underground lair, giant robot arms dismantle Tommy’s car. Astro Boy’s super-hearing picks up Tommy’s cries and he goes under the road to force the gangster to fix the Silver Comet with the same robot arms that took it apart. Once Tommy is back in the race the gangster sends a giant robot to attack Astro Boy but he defeats it. Tommy wins the race.
No comments:
Post a Comment