Looking back on my writing portfolio was an experience more vulnerable than I was prepared for. I started from the beginning, Me As A Writer. Reading an older piece, albeit only by a few months, about my reasons for writing excited me to write more again. It was like a reminder of my love for…
Essays
Should We Be Reading The Nights?
The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy begins with the mention of an adulterous woman, promptly followed by her murder. The set up provides us with context for an entire collection of parables, with the moral being that women are manipulative cheaters who use men for their own means and pleasure. The book has multiple explicit…
Longer Reflection
My assumption walking into this class was that I would be more knowledgeable on the topic than I found myself to be. As arrogant as it admittedly sounds, I believed that I couldn’t possibly learn all that much about a topic I had already done some of my own research on due to my interest…
The Marketplace of Agrabah:
A Classist Mockery of the Middle East In the first scene where we see the main character Aladdin on the screen, he is presented as a “street rat” and a thief running away from the soldiers. It is an action-packed scene with Aladdin and his monkey, Abu, cleverly tricking the guards and avoiding them, all…
SAID’S ORIENTALISM: FIRST GO!
The reading so far is focused solely on Balfour’s speech to the House of Commons. It feels like a build up to a bigger claim, and I can slowly see, so to say, the different points come together to form a claim. What stands out as important is that Said takes a British man’s point…
Reflection: Vision and Justice
I attended the talk given by Professor Sarah Lewis about the “ethics of the image” or the importance of the foundational right of just representation especially in contexts of American history and racial prejudice. I found the topic wholely fascinating; how she talked about the lack of regard or recognition as a form of violence…
The Orient First Draft
In the first scene where we see the main character Aladdin on the screen, he is presented as a “street rat” and a thief running away from the soldiers. It is an action-packed scene with Aladdin and his monkey Abu cleverly tricking the guards and avoiding them, all while singing a song. It is in…
Ernst Analysis
In ‘Islam In The Eyes Of The West’, Ernst makes one overarching argument; the ‘so-called West’ has entirely inaccurate notions of the Islamic world as a civilization separate from itself. He bridges the gap between the two by emphasizing their history and reducing the alienated lens the West views Islam from. He puts forward three…
Reflection on The Nights
The most notable thing in the prologue to me was the recurrent theme of misogyny. It was everpresent through nearly every sentence. In subtle ways such as use of words like “slut” (p.68), the king calling the women “his women and his concubines” (p.63) (which is ironic considering he was angry about them sleeping with…
The Great Allentown Fair
The Great Allentown Fair didn’t seem all that great to me. If we’re being honest, it didn’t seem very fun at all. Maybe it was the way the sun chose that day to blind me or the fact that someone or the other seemed to be straying and going missing every few minutes. Maybe it…
