Автор: Пользователь скрыл имя, 16 Мая 2012 в 20:02, сочинение
Работа включает в себя основные филосовские точки зрения о возникновении и развитии постколонеальной теории на примере Бразилии. Исследование основанно на фильме "Город Бога" и включает в себя 10 используемых источников.
Polina Nechuy-Veter 1
Polina Nechuy-Veter
Allyson Larkin
Social Justice and Peace Studies 2273B-2012
13 April 2012
“City of God”
“God created man, but Sam Colt made them equal”
Favela (City of God) – is a place where the bow between the city and countryside stops. This is a zone of stalkers, the place where a suburb becomes a restricted area, inacceptable to the uninitiated.
Modern cinema policy teaches us that on the silver screen goodness triumphs over evil, love conquers death, and everyone has equal rights and opportunities. Forgetting about the correctness, Fernando Marellish, the Brazilian director, tells us the story, where the good and evil does not exist at all, doomed love, death, commands, and equal rights and opportunities can be confirmed approved only by guns and weapons.
The
theory of optimists says that initially, people are born good, only
bad education and environment or severe life circumstances contribute
to the cultivation of the negative traits of human nature. Brazilian
filmmaker shows us that people of favela, from birth already living
in such an environment, believe that this is the normal course of things
and the way it should be. And through their lives environment just exacerbates
their weakness.
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Favela “City of God” – a suburb, Brazil capital’s ghetto, with people defined as dregs of society. There are no laws, no government, and all the rules are established by drug gangs. An environment influenced on citizens the way that it gives them awareness and confidence that in an order to get out of this hell, there is no other chance, but crime – “Buscapé (Rocket): It was like a message from God: "Honesty doesn't pay, sucker." “
Through
all the social sciences post-colonialism is quite young science that’s
beginning dates back to 50’s and 60’s years of XX’s century. The
greatest popularity post-colonialism got in 1980. It was during this
period of time to be the most blossoming of the science itself as evidenced
by the works of famous scholars of social sciences and poets of that times,
such as Aime´ Ce´saire (1955), influenced by his work Fanon (1961),
Edward Said and Homi Close to the matter is the concept of “progress”
and “modernity” that are often seen as progress in the economic science
and engineering, respectively, the country that is not developing as quickly
as the other in this area is seen as primitive. At the same time concepts
such as cultural values and traditional knowledge are not taken into
account at all. That leads to neocolonialism (Wyrick and Beasley, 1997). Post colonialism also
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the fact that
this region is made known to the explorers of Anglo-Saxon origin,
whose travel notes, journals, films,
Thus
the name “Latin America” itself helped to create this “tropical”
term, since it was invented by the same explorers, who came to New World. People
with very different ethnic groups and religions were united by one common
term. With the establishment of the new name of the region, a new region’s
people with completely opposite to Anglo-Saxon population name was created,
this kind of relationship was characterised by Quijano as the “controlling
and controlled” with appropriate hierarchical
According to the beginning of the movie, we can see total anarchy which is considered by people of favela as good violence (actually it was more of attempts to public and private property) like when they stole gas bags, and were treated more as heroes then as mobs. And the treatment was terminated when 8-10 year old boy decides to kill all motel customers and he did it, did with the smile on his face! The whole City thought those murderers still belong to that “heroes” gang. Thus this perfectly shows that there is still no border between “good and bed violence”. Violence always means something bed, whenever you do, as Ivan Illich called his work with appropriate for this paragraph name, we can say “To hell with good intentions.”
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“There is no "good violence" that can follow on automatically from "bad violence" and be legitimized by it. All violence, "good" or "bad", always sanctions a disjunction. The reinvention of politics in postcolonial conditions first requires people to depart from the
logic of vengeance, above all when vengeance wears the shabby garb of the law.” (Achille Mbembe “What is postcolonial thinking?”)
The movie is divided into several short stories, each of which serves as a prelude to the next. The picture covers about thirty years of the Brazilian ghetto. In each time intervals there are also included some of the love stories. In first decades there are two storylines with the implication. The first story tells about true love of a young couple who are trying by any means to escape from the surrounding reality, and specifically only way they know - robbery. Another story is more interesting for this work. A young gangster falls in love with the wife of the local "snitch." As a result, the jealous husband, finding his wife cheating in a burst of hate deprives her life. In “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Coioniai Discourses” Chandra Talpade Mohanty explains common traditions of marriage rituals in third word’s counties based on Bemba’s experience. “Cutrufelli cites the marriage ritual of the Bemba as a multistage event "whereby a young man becomes incorporated into his wife's family group as he takes up residence with them and gives his services in return for food and maintenance."" As we can see this is a perfect example of tribal marriage tradition: the wife obviously married not on the basis of pure and sincere feelings, but relying on her nation’s traditions. The stories of more present and developed times shows us more liberal attitude to various manifestations of love, for example the narrative always says not that he just likes a girl, but wants to lose his virginity with the girl. All the subsequent stories of this area do not tell us any about an official marriage, and other generally accepted rules of marital behavior. Perhaps the reason is
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that the storyteller is just a teenager, from the rare lucky persons, who successfully avoids the role of a victim or an executor in a bloody slaughter. Even though still times are changing, and each nation develops with an eye to the other countries.
With all the murder scenes abundance, this movie cannot be called as blood and violence cultivating. The director was trying to show the pure nature of human beings not beyond society
frameworks and how do all that
tribe’s rules of “equity” work in reality. In fact all action
takes place during Brazilian revolution (1964-1985).
Culmination (the most severe terms) accounts for the period of Humberto
de Alencar Castello Branco’s reign, who in turn is characterized by an
authoritarian regime. One major feature of the authoritarian regime is
the deprivation of the individual guarantees of security in the relationship with
the government. As we can observe in the first decade of the scenario it
is repeatedly shown to the viewer scenes of lawlessness manifestations on
the part of authorities as murders, violence acts against the civilians
and as in general complete incompetence.
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“ideological alliance” between USA and Brazil can be pursued not only Roosevelt and Rockefeller’s policy, but also geographical proximity in addition (Moura, 1990).
Another story line with positive narrative, tells us a lesson close to Ivan Illich’s point of view in his article “To Hell with Good Intentions”. This character’s name is Bene, through all the action (until his death) even though this gangster is equal to all his friends from the gang not to mention that his best friend is the most severe character from the rest not far behind in the number of victims, but clearly takes pleasure in his "craft" (Li’l Ze). Nevertheless Bene makes certainly positive impression through all his generosity, kindness and the openness of the soul. Finally Bene got the bullet which was intended to Li’l Ze, but only because he was trying to do one more generous gesture to his friend. Therefore we can clearly see the point of Ivan Illich that you should not argue with the established behaviour in an existing community. Otherwise the environment will “hit or spit”. In Russia we have idiom for this phenomenon – “a bear service”.
On the other hand I cannot completely agree with Illich’s opinion about volunteering. Without doubt it is not very tactfully to obviously volunteering is beneficial activities, which does not only help the development of individual regions, but also unit people with different racial, gender, ethnic or religious affiliation. People who sacrifice their idleness for the welfare of absolutely unknown to those, who are in need, certainly give more hope to the world for a bright future. For example David Jefferess’s article shows growth and experience of volunteer associations:” In 2007 students and faculty raised more than $40 000 for the nursing program project to visit two villages in northern Ghana to give the gift of six donkeys and carts, a small herd of goats, mosquito nets for 120 women and their children, and seed money for opening bank accounts (“Project Grow” 2008: para. 3).” May be it is not reorganisation of the entire city,
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but at least something. The more people pay attention to this problem, the better our world becomes!
In this movie, human ingenuity is a necessary way to survive in subhuman conditions. Teenager Rocket, is the only who will be able to overcome the attraction of a bloody nightmare. He can win the respect of gangs, becoming their spokesperson – mafia’s personal photographer.
This brilliant illustration of developing ghetto can be called a film, where violence is no longer something extraordinary, and perhaps this is the reason of having such a strong impression after watching it, as it does not fit into the framework of contemporary social behaviour rules. Killing in favela is natural as intercourse and thefts and robberies are a sign of bravery and courage of those who committed them. “A kid? I smoke, I snort. I've killed and robbed. I'm a man.” - says one of the young gangsters.
Thirty years of incessant murders, robberies and violence. A man who rape and kill women, corrupt cops releasing thugs from a custody, children that kill other children – all of it is a real life in the City of God. The film is founded on the novel of Paulo Lins which is based on real events of the war of drug traffickers gangs that occurred in 1970’s in Brazil. This war is twisted into a spiral of life main character’s lives: pathological murderer Li’l Ze, languid teenager Rocket, who is trying to break out of the bloody mincer of Brazil slums, all the other inhabitants of the ghetto.
In “Black Skin, White Masks” (1967) Frantz Fanon says “The racial domination of the colonies was legitimated through racist propaganda (69), through religious institutions that equated darkness with evil and inhumanity (6-7), all serving to instill “a mood of submission” in subjugated peoples.” (Frantz Fanon’s Theory of Racialization Implications for Globalization by
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Nazneen Kane
University of Maryland, College Park). Even though nowadays the strict
policy against racism has been successfully preceded basically, still
some people are subject to stereotyping,
Every culture is unique. It is always wrong to embrace it from the territorial or any other aspect. It is like tree bark, you should go through all the layers to explore its age, specific features.
It is rather a distribution
of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological,
historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration
not only of a basic geographic distinction (the world is made
up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series
of ‘interests’ which, by such means as scholarly discovery,
philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape
and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains;
it is, rather than expresses a certain will or intention
to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate,
what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world;
it is, above
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all, a discourse that is by no means in direct corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in uneven exchange with various
kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do). (Richard Clarke. Edward Said and Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient)
This is a proper way to explain how we should consider a country, a nation. Usually people think of Brazil as of a place with everyday carnival, with dancing half naked Brazilians, as a country full of carefree life and every day’s fun. Until I saw this film I thought the same way, and I did not even know about that gang’s way right in Rio de Janeiro’s suburbs! Said also maintained about the same as an example of orient, that due to Western influence creates a distorted perception of the inhabitants of the East as barbarians, so that Orientalism has acted as an explanation for the unknown to the West behaviour.
World is not perfect
and before changing it we should start from ourselves. Nothing
is forever now you are king of slums, and tomorrow a new generation of small
Zes who are already about to target between the eyes, casually glancing at
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Work Cited