Allusions In No Church In The Wild

Dr. King strategically breaks down and characterizes acquiescence as a form of dealing with oppression. Through his analysis, King explains how people

Some movies have strong connections to famous books, epics, or myths. Often times, there will be many strong allusions to different epics, but there will be few weak allusions. In Joel and Ethan Coen's O’Brother Where Art Thou, The movie has strong allusion with the plot, hero qualities, and the minor characters of The Odyssey,

In this essay, we will discuss two pieces of literature, Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. Both pieces are “about defying what is expected of you in order to do what is right.” Plato’s allegory is about a man who was born a prisoner, stuck in one position, who is later freed and experiences life outside of the cave. King Jr. explains his reason for being in a jail. We will discuss how they were both faced with opposition, and I will detail a time where I was faced with opposition while going again societal “norms”.

Americans celebrate false information about the spreading of culture, exploration by Europeans, and people who previously lived in the region. We have a holiday for a man who was very cruel because he started slavery, a period of genocide, and was racist. Finally we celebrate a man who used punishments like cutting of natives hands and noses, rape, and hunting dogs which eventually destroyed generations.

After constantly meeting brutality and threats with nonviolence and love, one begins to feel impatient and stressed. While in jail in Birmingham, Martin Luther King Jr. stated “As in so many of our past experiences, our hopes had been blasted…. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action”(document 2). In

Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who seldom cared what other people thought about him, lived in the moment. In doing so, He became furious over the amount of injustice. This essay shows King’s fury over injustice through the use of rhetorical appeals through ethos, logos, and pathos.

In his correspondence to his fellow clergymen entitled “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King, a promoter of peace and brotherhood, analyzes his act of non-violent resistance to clarify the necessitate of producing creative tension. King begins by elucidating the differences between just and unjust laws. According to King, unjust laws are human laws that are not harmonized with the natural laws of God that cause the degradation of personality and damage the soul. According to this ideology, King states that when injustice occurs there is a correct approach to civil disobedience. First, King expects one to collect information regarding the immoral implication of law with the intent of proving injustice. This requires one to be able to distinguish between the laws of man and the laws of good, the immoral laws and moral laws, the unjust laws and just laws. Next, negotiation is used to establish an understanding of the endured injustice; however, this purpose is not to humiliate or defeat the adversary, but to promote friendship through a form of selfless and spiritual love known as agape. As Martin Luther King Jr. points out, “It is an overflowing love which seeks noting in return. And when you come to love on this level you begin to love men not because they are likeable, not because they do things that attract us, but because God loves them and here we love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does” (“Non-violence” 2).

From the time they are children, these people learn the holiness of “we”—that the only good is the good for all, that solitary man is evil. Each day, they stand and recite the mantra, “We are nothing. Mankind is all. We exist through, by, and for our brothers who are the State.” Their entire adult lives are governed by a system of

As the holiday season is coming nearer each day, I found it appropriate to look further into the traditional Thanksgiving topic. I can only describe what my family does, my Puerto Rican and Caucasian family. As far as I can say, we are not necessarily traditional with our celebration of Thanksgiving. So I figured why not use this assignment as a way to further look into the holiday and how it is celebrated across America, this can mean anything from families celebrating it in their homes, to the retail shops of the country selling holiday/seasonal items to go along with the tradition. I would like to examine the traditions of thanksgiving.

The subject of God is rarely talked about in modern society compared to traditional times because like in Kanye West’s song, Jesus Walks, “ If I talk about God my record won’t get played.” The unknown in society is scary to people which connects to the denial that God exists. As well as, the continuation of the inner human struggles. It is hard to look down at the world, and believe there is a God with all the evil in the world. In contrast, Kanye West declares that people are constantly at war with their environment, and believes the root of all conflict lies internally. A rap song that talks about God but has references to terrorism and racism which are both conflicts that this modern society deals with. The four-minute music video is a collection of stories of reprehensible characters; crafted into a modern biblical visual to signify the inner and outer conflicts of mankind.

Henry Ford served as the inventor for the assembly line. He believed that the idea of independently manufacturing products was too inefficient and cultivated the idea to move the product instead of the people building it. Ford also pioneered technological research in developing products. Ford served as the turning point for technology; introducing and utilizing break-through ideas. Not only did he change how automobiles were manufactured, he changed the way people thought about technology. He made new technologies readily accessible and set the standard for the 20th century. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Huxley makes Ford the center-point for why the new society was created, the old one was un-happy and inefficient. Replacing God

“The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.” (Orwell).

Despite the rise of oppression and authoritarianism in societies, historically free will always prevails over determinism. Both Steven Spielberg and Arthur Miller in Minority Report and The Crucible, respectively, establish settings ravaged by authoritarianism as a means to embody fundamental concepts regarding the conflict between free will and determinism. Both authors use extensive imagery of religion, symbolism of characters and contrasting images of social responsibility and personal desire to draw attention to their idea that an individual always has choice and the capacity for free will despite the presence of determinism and authoritarianism in society. Spielberg and Miller use this idea as a foundation to establish universal messages connecting conflicting free will and determinism to oppression, suggesting that true freedom exists only when societies stand up to deterministic views designed to bring profit to only a select few.

Two political cartoons, “School Begins” by Puck and “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” by G.F Keller, both published in the late nineteenth century, avail of distinct examples in order to reveal America's attempt to civilize immigrants and non-white groups as a means of granting them social acceptance throughout the nineteenth century. “School Begins” exhibits Uncle Sam, a popular U.S. cartoon figure throughout history, as the dominant white American male in the center. In the cartoon, the class is made up of well-disciplined students studying books labeled with their state’s name, juxtaposed with the disorderly class seated in the front made up of the “Philippines, Hawaii, Porto Rico, and Cuba.” The territories are depicted as uncivilized, serving the racist and denigrating image that justified the right to govern the new territories gained after the Spanish-American War of 1898. In “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner”, immigrants and Americans of different backgrounds sit around a table, prepared for the feast . The groups represented at the dinner reveal unruly characteristics and stereotypical representations of each group’s food to highlight their conflicting differences in American society. By looking at how the artists utilize the exaggeration of non-white and immigrant groups, we can see the dominant civilizing narrative the U.S. secured through imperialism and assimilation, and this is salient because it exhibits a racist hierarchy that justified Western civilization

In this essay I shall compare James Scott’s theory of power and resistance with Michel Foucault’s, as in what similarities do they share in their structure of theories; and contrast the difference as in their understanding of power, position they take to look for/into power, exercise of power and resistance in response. By contrasting the two approaches on the subject of power and resistance, I shall argue, if one wish to look for the powerful and the weak, Scott’s approach is the go to. But for now, I find Foucault’s idea more plausible that we are surrounded by or inescapable from power, and that by any means, are not necessarily forced to submission; rather as freedom the same time.