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Behind The Beautiful Forever Katherine Bou Analysis

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Katherine Boo’s Stereotypical Delineation of Contemporary India in Behind the Beautiful Forever: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Under city Abstract The Western writing about India has always been a grotesque and is the common trend right from the day of Britain rule in India. This trend is still continuing in this 21st Century. Britain had lost its hold on Indian subcontinent in 1940’s and there persists the interest in viewing India through their colonial eyes. India’s embrace of globalization has reawakened their preexisting biases. Through their writings they distort real story of India so as to give emphasis to their superior status. In contemporary non-fiction books written by western writers’ they portray “East” as savage minded, criminals and “West” as superior, dominant type. Through this envision they created an image of East as the “Other” which is no way similar to them. This ideate distinction between East and West formed the basis of Edward Said’s “Orientalism”. The Eurocentric superiority perception compels them to distort the reality according to their preferences. The new tropes of representing East as the ‘other’ can be seen in Katherine Boo’s …show more content…

Katherine Boo through this book openly projects her biases through the imaginative representation of the lives of people in India. She is ignorant of India’s past and in her portrait of concurrent situations in India, she is openly dishonest .Boo claims that this book is her first hand account of the condition of people of India’s slum but this cannot be fully relied as it is not true representation of real

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Being Unique Before Fitting In During the 1950s, a majority of women were expected to live up to certain standards. Each member of the family was expected to act a certain way and fit into the mold of society. Woman in the 1950s typically did not look at a man on the side of the street to see what is inside a bucket, let alone even stop to ask what is in the bucket. But the mother in “Bucket of Blood” written by Katherine Waugh displays a different approach to life and her family. She displays how every family is unique and it is okay to be the one that stands out.

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Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers showcases the lives of several slum dwellers of Annawadi, a slum situated closely to the Mumbai Airport. The book goes through many of the Annawadi inhabitants’ lives, concentrating on individual character’s conflicts, including personal challenges, and their journey of actions to overcome them. The characters each have a unique mystique in which produces great role models to a general audience, including especially the reader. Abdul, Manju, and Sunil are three characters of Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers that are particularly portrayed as role models.

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444 Words | 2 Pages

In the novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith tells the story of Francie Nolan, from when she is a little girl curios about the wonders of the world, to a grown woman who has experienced all the pain and the hardships the world has to offer. The exposition in the book begins in the summertime of 1912 in Brooklyn, New York. The main characters, Katie Nolan and Neeley Nolan, are revealed as they complete their Saturday ritual of selling junk to Carnie the junkie, and spending the extra money on candy and toys. Francie has a difficult life because her father, Johnny, is the town drunk and struggles to find work, while her mother, Katie, works all day to support their family.

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600 Words | 3 Pages

For this assignment I chose the children’s story, I Love My Hair by Natasha Tarpley. Published in 2001, I Love My Hair is a story about a young African American girl, Keyana. In the book, Keyana talks about sitting between her mama’s knees and having her hair combed every night just before she goes to sleep. Keyana mentions that while her mama uses coconut oil and is gentle when combing her hair, it sometimes still hurts, especially when her mama combs over the tangled places. Keyana tries hard not to cry but a few tears manage to come out as Keyana yells “Stop mama!”

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Born to Bengali parents in July 1967,in London and with her family’s move to Rhode Island, Jhumpa Lahiri began life in the U.S.A. She grew up in the background of traditional Bengali culture. From childhood, she often accompanied her back to India-particularly to Calcutta (now known as Kolkata).. She observes that her parents retain a sense of emotional exile and she herself grew up with conflicting expectations. In her work, Lahiri, is a second-generation immigrant, reflects on the Indian diaspora and creates a narrative that reveals the inconsistency of the concept of identity and cultural difference in the space of diapora.

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But back when Marco Polo was alive, the “west” were people who lived in the Mongol region. Marco Polo was from Venice, and there they referred to westerner’s as “others.” Throughout the reading, the word “other” is said a lot, especially in a certain part of the story line. “Other visitors…” (Latham, 130), “Other city…other province…”

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The idea of having “primitive” (367) fantasies describes the West’s fascination of moving away from a Eurocentric commodity culture and appropriating the Other through fetishization and cultural appropriation. In Myra Macdonald’s “Muslim Women and the Veil”, the idea of “the scopic regime of modernity” (9) is “the desire to penetrate behind the veil” (9). The West’s obsession of unveiling captures the essence of colonialism as it is considered a way to make “aliens” conform to the dominating power. Muslim women veiling themselves rejects the male gaze and voyeurism hence the aspiration to “liberate” them becomes more desirable. Through these approaches, many films with people of colour fail the anti-racist Bechdel Test due to the lack of a story arc in those characters.

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One of the things that really stood out to me in this chapter, was the part where the woman had pushed his son. Coates said that if he had told the woman that when she pushed his son she was acting according to the tradition that black bodies are lesser. She would have replied with the “I am not racist” statement. I can remember the numerous times that I have heard that statement from different people. This statement always seems to be made by people who are blinded by the truth in our society, or are trying to justify their wrongs with this statement.

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1002 Words | 5 Pages

A Room Providing Freedom?    A woman is given limited freedom. Something as simple as a room could give her a sense of liberty. In Virginia Woolf 's article, she claims that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

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504 Words | 3 Pages

Arabs were the ‘Oriental Other.’ A defining pillar in maintaining white supremacy, Orientalism works to dehumanize Arab-Americans while propping up white Americans and to a lesser extent non-Arab people of color. Arabs were used for little more than comic relief in order to make Americans appear smarter and more resourceful. According to Andrea Smith in her essay, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” the logic of Orientalism is that certain nations and their people are inferior as well as a threat to the well being of an empire” (68). The empire in this case would be the United States.

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1050 Words | 5 Pages

The MS School’s approach and methodology were also critiqued which Smith addressed in a 1986 essay where he describes his approach as having been a “naïvely inductive examination of nineteenth-century American attitudes towards the West.” (Symbol and Idea 27) Smith acknowledged that by primarily focusing on literature and avoiding dealing with “conflicts that are ideological in the political sense,” (Symbol and Idea 21) the MS School’s approach had itself evoked a mythic and romanticized image of the West. This point has also been one of the objections from critics of the MS School: that there is a “lack of clarity about the relations between facts and the myths that spun around them.” (Fabian, The West 130) This is also noted by Bruce Kuklick who states that “symbols and myths at best reflect empirical fact, and so are never themselves factual.”

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1776 Words | 8 Pages

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919 Words | 4 Pages

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Originally it was delivered in May, 1963 as the Rabindranath Tagore Memorials Lectures in Berkely. In this book he talks about the concept of sanskritisation, westernisation, secularisation, caste mobility and also talks about some thoughts on the study of one’s own society. Since M.N Srinivas is an Indian Social Anthropologist, he addressed social change in modern India from the social Anthropologist point of view. He reissues this book on 1977 for better understanding the process of sanskritisation, westernisation and secularisation.

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