The following blog posts will be dedicated to the work of my
students, who have attempted (successfully), the art of the position
paper. I open their text to the world, not just the Nova community, so
learing and sharing can take place.
The first text in the series belongs to Giacomo Bagarella, class of 2009.
It is readily apparent that most civilized societies are based
on exclusion, regardless of the degree of democracy or totalitarianism
present in the system. From the onset of settled livelihood in
Mesopotamia, to the Classical civilizations in China, India, and the
Mediterranean basin, up to today’s globalized world, the so-called
monolith of these societies has always found recurrent buttresses in a
group of people downcast for that purpose. What barbarians were to
Greece and Rome were the outcastes of India, just as the “pagans” of
the Christian Middle Ages were what homosexuals or “Arab
fundamentalists” are today.
As we will see, the trope of the “Other” I will trace in
several literary works takes place in properly defined civilizations ,
a factor crucial to the understanding of this concept (also o
outside of literature). Toni Morrison’s Beloved unravels itself in the midst of a growingly imperialist nation, the US. David Henry Hwang’s M.Butterfly,
on the other hand, takes place in a postcolonial “dominion ”, where
Western foreigners form a clique in assumed superiority of the Chinese
natives. Finally, Tony Kushner’s complete play Angels in America concludes
the tercet of texts, providing insight on recent tendencies towards
exclusion as they unfold in a modern society.
Now, the presence of the “Other” may appear as a persistent trait in
human history in which a group of people(s) is subjugated to another
following the “logic” of Social Darwinism. However, upon careful
scrutiny, it comes down to much more than that. The entity of the
“Other” serves a much more profound and unsettling dualism with the
Monolith (for example, WASPs in US society). As it is present to stand
in (often quiet) contrast of the Monolith, the “Other” not only serves
the purpose of highlighting several central “values” or “mores” of the
monolith itself by negative comparison, but it also perpetually defines
the monolith as ever superior and establishes its unquestionable
authority.
Both before and after the US Civil War, the condition of
African-Americans, especially psychologically, remained majorly
unchanged. Regardless of the abolition of slavery, racism was still a
pervasive belief, and besides a few isolated nuclei where both Blacks
and Whites coexisted normally the situation was dire. Sethe, one of the
central characters of Toni Morrison’s Neo-Slave-Narrative Beloved,
epitomizes the scars which, penetrating much more than just torn,
expropriated skin, afflict a whole society. Sethe’s grief at her murder
of her first daughter Beloved, together with abuses she had suffered
while a slave, remain within her psyche even after she is officially
“emancipated”. This perpetual demeaning of the African-American body
and soul serves the drastic purpose of consolidating the Whites in
their position of padreternae of the postcolonial American society.
Even without official legal support (which would soon be created),
Whites continued in their campaign of making the bonds of the
African-Americans nothing but their society’s veil straps; tight in
controlling a propelling “object”, yet malleable upon any wish by the
boatswain.
Clearly, skin color was the principal basis for the
discrimination of African-Americans before and after the Emancipation
Proclamation. Grounded on centuries of belief of superiority, engraved
in tomes upon tomes of degenerative Western rationalism, American
racism divided the New World society as clearly as the night and day.
Whites did not only gain cheap labor, but also the moral “comfort” that
they had a spot, assured by God, ahead both of the Christianized
ex-Africans and the savage American Indians. With this conviction, it
wasn’t hard to create a system in which race subsumed duty, and in
which it was easy for Whites to stay aloft at the expense of the
African-American “Others”. Scholarship was a crucial determinant in
this establishment, as African-Americans were kept at a low-education
level (with few exceptions), which comfortably provided scarce
insurgent ideology, a self-humiliating rationale (in face of the White
“learned gentlemen”), and a possibility to subsist only on the most
meager of jobs. Emerging from this grim background of forced
obsequiousness, Denver (Sethe’s daughter) manages both to defeat the
ghosts of the slave inheritance and to shape her path to a higher
education institution like Oberlin College. The “Others”, dissatisfied
with a destiny of bondage, rise up and refute their position as serfs
and enhancers of White supremacist ideology.
Moving a century closer to our times, David Henry Hwang’s M.Butterfly
encapsulates the trope of the “Other” in the 1960s and 1970s Maoist
China. Western diplomats, such as protagonist René Gallimard, are
imbued with centuries of filo-Occidental thought, and create
comfortable niches for themselves amidst the “uncivilized” Chinese
population. These men and women, overlooking China’s status as a rising
world power, consider the relations to that country and to its people
nothing more but a continuation of the Western domination of the 19th
Century. In social interaction, Chinese people are scarcely treated as
human beings (especially women), and this results in the sexist and
Orientalist behavior of the aforementioned diplomats. In addition to
this, the scenes which comment on the political events of the era
reflect this tendency on a broader scale. Asian nationalists striving
for independence are viewed as childish subjects who, once subjugated,
will fall in line again and be more than content in being ruled by the
self-assumed “superior” foreigners. This is particularly true in the
René’s analysis of the Vietnam War; to him, the Vietnamese will soon
realize the benefits of occupation in front of the more advanced
Americans, and will joyfully adopt the power’s customs and bend to
their demands.
Thus, alongside the heritage of slavery and imposed European
supremacy on African deportees, Asia too suffers the fate of seeing its
inhabitants being turned into “Others”. White men, certainly more
virile, intelligent, and able than their Chinese counterparts, should
consequently not only expect the latter to kowtow to them, but also to
draw freely from the Asian nation’s women, mines, and treasures. Again,
white becomes the pure and desirable skin color, with the tinted yellow
scorned and refuted (in history and tradition) in a last-ditch attempt
to preserve European political and psychological supremacy as well as a
limiting condition of “Otherness” for Asian peoples.
As globalization and civil rights movements eradicated many of
the cultural and religious inequalities of the late 20th Century, race
lost its position as keystone of the Monoliths’ resistance. Without any
more rebellious natives to face and use as pretext for empowerment,
governments and high-strata social factions had to find a new “Other”.
These were comfortably engendered in the expanding groups of
homosexuals and of other peoples with non-mainstream ideology, such as
communists. Angels in America, a play by Tony Kushner, renders
perfectly the struggles of homosexuals in the alienating society of
Reaganite America. Accused not only of deviating from “normal”
principles of heterosexual relationships but also of propagating the
threat of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, homosexual men (including Mormons,
Jews, etc.) have to combat their status as “Others” even against people
who are indistinguishable from them in all but one aspect. Emarginated
and decimated by the disease, homosexuals become involuntary pawns in
political power-play, where easy votes can be had by renouncing rights
to people with a different sexuality.
“Indicting” homosexual men and women with two diseases, mental
(for their sexuality) and physical (for AIDS/HIV), the heterosexual
majority is able to confirm their own “normality” and their higher
roles in what supposedly is a “free society”. Angels in America displays
the multiple struggles homosexuals have to take on; against society at
large, against themselves, against their emotions, and against a
festering, silent killer. Finally, even in a modern, industrialized
nation, like the United States, the need for “Others” remains
apparently high. It is saddening to witness this not only in the States
but all over the world too; the push for democracy and common human
rights, rather than promoting debate and cooperation, strengthens
partisanship and factionalism instead – of course, always at the
expense of some minority.
The scope of homosexual “Otherness” demonstrates that this
trope is not racist; it is not biased, much less regional. Ironically,
it envelops in its embrace all people and cultures by making each and
every one of us a potential “Other”, whether it be for our nationality,
ideology, or any other trait which may serve the occasional Monolith’s
purpose. Literary works, such as Angels in America, Beloved, and M. Butterfly,
open gates of reflection upon these issues, stimulating each of our
minds to confront current and past discriminations from a fair,
tolerant, and amending perspective. Having followed exclusion and its
goals so far, in about 3000 years of human history, I can only hope
that the future will be different, and that groups will base their
status upon real strength and not a prejudiced demeaning of any
“Other”, whoever it may be.
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