Discuss some of the ways that Native Americans and African Americans have been depicted in Hollywood films throughout the history of cinema.
Discuss some of the ways that Native Americans and African Americans have been depicted in Hollywood films throughout the history of cinema. How have Native American and African American filmmakers responded to these depictions and subverted them by reshaping visual narratives of cultural identity? Use specific filmic examples to support your analysis. Your answer should demonstrate a breadth of knowledge about Native and African American cinema as well as the dominant cinematic discourses on race and ethnicity that these self-representations challenge.
Select any two of the fictional films from the assigned viewing from this lesson (EXCEPT FOR BIRTH OF A NATION), and discuss how these films defy stereotypical representations of African Americans or Native Americans. Your answer should also demonstrate that you have viewed at least two of the assigned documentary films carefully (i.e., Reel Injun, Classified X, and Ethnic Notions).
Drawing from Reel Injun, Classified X, and Ethnic Notions, discuss 4 or more stereotypical representations of Native Americans and African Americans in Hollywood films. How are race and ethnicity represented in Hollywood films, historically and currently? Which types of characters and experiences are represented, and which types are excluded? Who constructs these representations and how do they reflect contemporary socio-political contexts? Use specific examples from each of these documentaries to support your analysis.
Characters in many of the assigned films are confronting not only questions of their racial and ethnic identities, but also issues of class, gender, and sexual orientation. Discuss how the intersection of these identity elements affects characters in at least 2 of the films discussed. Be sure to use specific examples from these films, and contrast your selected individuals with other characters who are not integrating multiple identities.
Sample Solution
Aristotle characterizes living as “what recognizes things with spirits from things without spirits.” In request to comprehend the spirit, it is important to comprehend the types of life which Aristotle indicates, for whatever has even one of these structures is viewed as living. Notwithstanding, plants and people creatures, for example, are not the equivalent in that they have various types of spirits with various limits. Aristotle negates Empedocles’ conviction that in earth becoming descending and fire normally moving upwards, this is the way plants develop (by putting roots down on the earth and by broadening upwards). Or maybe, the unfit reason for this development and sustenance, as per Aristotle, is the spirit. The piece of the spirit that has a place with the plant is called nutritive, which is the thing that enables it to develop and be sustained, and furthermore to duplicate. The capacity to produce or replicate is basic, and as indicated by Aristotle, it is “the end they [living things] all take a stab at” (415b). These nutritive limits are kept up as the establishment of all things. While a few things, for example, plants, have just a single possibility (or limit) of the spirit, different things have mutiple, and different things have the entirety of the possibilities. There is a kind of chain of importance of the spirits, in that whichever has the “higher” limits will likewise keep up the “lower” limits, and plants contain just the lower limits of sustenance. Creatures contain these equivalent nutritive limits as plants, and moreover have the insightful piece of the spirit, in that they can effectively contact and feel. In addition, the capacity to see (joy and torment) infers that they will likewise have the ability to want, just as hunger for things that are charming which they will, thus, want. Contact is important as an establishment for different faculties, however contact can likewise happen alone inside a creature. As indicated by Aristotle, “contact is the essential kind of recognition having a place with all creatures” (413b), and even without movement or headway (change of spot), whatever has observation is said to be a creature. Moreover, the individual is at the most elevated finish of this chain of command of spirits, in that they contain the entirety of the past limits, just as the reasoning part and astuteness (by which the spirit thinks and assumes). The scholarly piece of the spirit and the seeing piece of the spirit are unmixed and isolated, in addition, they are unaffected in various ways. Like Anaxagoras’ concept of the mind “acing” encompassing things and different pieces of the spirit, Aristotle affirms that it is fundamental for the acumen to be both unaffected and “unmixed” so as to work appropriately. As Aristotle depicts â “For after a sense sees something truly discernible, it can’t see; in the wake of hearing noisy sounds, for example, it cann>
