Do we find our selves or do we create our selves? Here’s a thumbnail image to an “Opus” cartoon from Sunday, October 29, 2006 that asks this question. Click the image to the full-size cartoon:
October 31, 2006
Postmodern Cartoon of the Day: Opus
Posted by Jon under 04 - Socialization, 05 - Social Structure & Interaction, Postmodernism[2] Comments
November 1, 2006 at 4:20 pm
“While it is dangerous to imagine that one can speak for others (that is, paradigmatically replace them), it is something else again to speak with or alongside others in the sense of forming alliances. In this sense we are less interested in identity as something one `has,’ than in identification as something one `does’” (UE 346).
“Attend showings of a Tarzan film in the Antilles and in Europe. In the Antilles, the young Negro identifies himself de facto with Tarzan against the Negroes. This is much more difficult for him in a European theatre, for the rest of the audience, which is white, automatically identifies him with the savages on the screen” (quoted in UE 348).
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 2005.
November 1, 2006 at 7:32 pm
Thanks for these great quotes. It adds the issue of power and context to the options in the Opus cartoon. Both the options in the cartoon are more individualistic than social. The first assuming some fundamental essence to be discovered by us and the second assuming that we control our identity construction, as if the contexts within which we exist, the options available to us, and our power relative to others doesn’t matter.