Coen And Hosseini's 'O Brother, Where Art Thou' And The Kite Runner

Comparatively, ‘The kite runner’, explores the disparity created by differences in cultural backgrounds. This connection manifests in the relationship between Amir and Hassan, though Amir is true to Hassan in private, he feels the need to relate to Hassan according to the prevailing social hierarchy in public. “Afghanistan is the land of the Pashtun’s…not the flat-nosed Hazara’s, these people pollute our homeland. They dirty our blood.” The inclusive language at the beginning of the quote is aimed at the Pashtun’s whereas the negative connotations of ‘pollute’ and ‘dirty’ emphasise the subservient position of the Hazara’s in the Afghani society and thus losing their sense of placement within society. Amir has to face that fact he is disloyal to his relationship with Hassan and begins personal growth. “He’s my servant! Had I really though that?” “Everywhere I turned I saw signs of his loyalty, his goddamn unwavering loyalty.” the absence of conjunction emphasises his thorough regrets that act as a barrier preventing him from

This essay aims to analyze the representation of characters in the film Caché (French for “hidden”, 2005) and the racial issues between the colonizer and the colonized through the psychoanalysis of colonialism and post-colonialism. I will first give a synopsis of the film. Directed by Michael Haneke, Caché presents the story of a bourgeois, middle-aged French man, George, who receives anonymous tapes. This makes him recall his childhood memory of an Algerian boy, Majid. Majid’s parents worked in George’s house but died in the massacre on 17th Oct., 1961 when the French police killed more than 200 Algerians. After Majid lost his parents, George’s parents originally planned to adopt him. However, as George was the only child in his family, he was afraid of letting Majid enter the family. He set up a lie by saying his father wanted Majid to kill a rooster. George then claimed to his parents that Majid did this to scare him; therefore George’s parents sent Majid to an orphanage. About forty years later, George, who has grown up and become a famous TV talk show host, lives with his wife and son in the city. One day his wife, Anne, receives a videotape recording their current home for several hours. They receive even more tapes with different recordings and threatening drawings of an odd, curly haired little man and a rooster with its head cut off. George tries to find out who is behind this and finds Majid. He accuses Majid of sending him the tapes as a threat;

In his novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini depicts his homeland Afghanistan as a host to many different cultures and classes, such as Pashtun and Hazara, Sunni and Shiite, with this dichotomy of beliefs and attributes being powerful enough to shape diverse, sometimes negative relationships amongst the characters of the novel and their behavior to each other, as well as establish that individual’s identity. Each person interprets the impact of the role of belief and social status differently, while all living in the same setting, adding to their complexity and depth as a character in the novel with many different figures tied together by the same geographical and cultural conditions.

Millions of people around the world are discriminated against, but Hazaras and Shias especially know the struggle of this, constantly being put at the bottom of the social class and knowing unfair treatment all too well. In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, the act of discrimination is portrayed throughout the novel and is the cause of many of the main events that occur in the novel. Hassan, a hare-lipped Hazara boy in the novel, feels the pain and torture of simply being who he was and endures the hardships of his ethnicity, but yet he never complains or wishes to change who he is, symbolizing his bravery. Therefore, discrimination and slander towards Hazaras in the novel gives a strong sense of unequalness among the two ethnicities, Pashtuns and Hazaras, and is not considered virtuous among societies today.

Many people have experienced situations that challenges their survival. Sometime people may experience a situation, like a friend betrayal or violence, in life that changes him/her short-term or have a long-term effect on the person you hurt or even yourself too. Everyone experiences, their own definition of survival, like taking five tests in a day or simply making it through the day, that can lead and help them find the insights of life that will guide them. Survival plays a role throughout two completely different stories which is what makes it different, but also displays resemblance that makes their stories similar. Amir, The Kite Runner, and the leader Ralph, Lord of the Flies, have both faced dramatic situations, betrayal of their friends, and violence making their each experience unique.

In The Photographer Into War- Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, one of the themes evident within the book is the difference between the stereotypes of Afghan people and who they actually are. The photographer, Didier Lefevre, is fueled by, “a profound respect and love for the people of Afghanistan, and a belief in the importance of their work” ( Lefevre x). The importance in that work was to show humanity in the faces the media portrays as terrorists. The media also portrays Afghanis for being uneducated, sheltered, and driven by religion. Throughout the book there are examples of Afghans that deserve empathy, but one page stood out from the rest: page 176. It displays Bassir Khan’s businessmen and bodyguard sitting unamused in the first panel, with the follow up panels of them leaving Didier in the room. The first panel in specific represents both the humanitarian and sheltered themes of the book. What is most interesting about the first panel, is the image itself confirms racial ambiguities. The men shown are of darker complexions, which is perceived as being inferior to whites. On top of that, it confirms that “non-whites” are violent, as one of the men are holding a gun. They are all men, wearing turbans and hats and worn down jackets. Peering at the first panel makes readers think Lefevre failed his mission to humanize Afghanis, but a closer look at the narrator 's block tells another story.

Lastly, another situation in which the theme, abuse of power and bullying, is evidently portrayed is when society’s power is abused and bullies Hazaras. Racial conflict is common, especially in Kabul, when those

In the novel The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini purposely utilizes setting to play a pivotal role in the portrayal of an important focus when narrating a post 9/11 Afghan and American novel. The author’s deliberate incorporation of Afghan and American settings over a 3-decade time frame successfully illustrates the differences and similarities between Eastern culture and Western culture, as well as highlighting the harm each culture cultivates. The emphasis placed upon the discrimination of Hazaras by the Pashtuns not only informs the readers of the socio-economic relations in Afghanistan but also addresses a parallelism of harm towards Afghanis from Americans. Hosseini breaks down post 9/11 stereotypes by showing that a person's socio-economic class or ethnic group does not determine their ability to form friendships, feel guilt and seek redemption. Khaled Hosseini rehumanizes a culture which has been demonized by the generalizations of many individual Americans and many Hollywood films. He does this by developing universal themes which demonstrate that Afghans and Americans

Khaled Hosseini’s sophomore novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, shares a setting with his previous novel, the turmoil of the recent decades of Afghanistan 's existence. However, despite similar themes, Hosseini once again manages to craft a story that is as engaging as it is poignant, as compassionate as it is critical, and as thoughtful as it is visceral.

Hollywood, the popular American entertainment industry, since its birth, has always been the center for producing films and circulating ideologies. With its coexistence with modernity, it is no doubt that Hollywood has produced films, which aim to entertain and to give the new thoughts and experience of modernity to its audiences around the world. Hence, in this essay I choose two films, ‘Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans’ and ‘The Notebook,’ which coming from different eras of Hollywood and functioning as vernacular modernism, for the analysis on their representation of modernity, based on Ben Singer’s work on features of modernity, focusing on the change in family, marriage, and love, the shift to the consumer culture, and the rise of mass mobility.

There are age related conflicts, cultural conflicts, religious conflicts and value based conflicts.  This movie is a film highlighting many cultural conflicts.  These conflicts continuously erupt in a working class Michigan neighborhood.  We will first examine a scene with religious cultural conflict. In the same scene we will see age based cultural conflict as well.  Next, we will examine a racial cultural conflict between the Hmong people and an American. After examining cultural conflicts, we will show two examples of popular culture in the film.  Then, we will provide the conflict management styles we would have employed to bring the same result as the current ending without the bloodshed and a general opinion of the film.

In Afghanistan, there is a divide between the Pashtuns and the Hazaras; the Pashtuns are upper class citizens who are treated with respect while the Hazaras are lower class, minority citizens who are treated poorly. Because of the contrasting history of the two groups, their responses to the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul were complete opposites. The Pashtuns “danced on [the] street,” (Hosseini 200) while the Hazaras cried “God help the Hazaras now” (Hosseini 213). The conflict between the Pashtuns and Hazaras in “The Kite Runner” directly reflects the real life issues in Afghanistan starting in the late 70’s and continuing on past 2001.

In brief, this study discusses about the representation of orientalism idea which is portrayed in the film Avatar. The film tells about the conflict between human and native people in Planet Pandora, where human exploits the land and oppresses the native. This study explores in what way the idea of orientalism is represented and how both narrative and non-narrative aspects of the film helped in delivering that representation.

In both Persepolis and The Kite Runner, readers are presented with two main characters in search for their own self-realization. According to Lukács’s theory, “the self-realization of the individual ultimately sheds some light also on ‘social reality’” (22). Ultimately, readers are able to gain insight to the social realities of the characters’ nation states in both novels. Persepolis allows readers to learn about women and femininity in Iran’s culture while The Kite Runner provides readers with the social reality of men and masculinity in Afghanistan’s culture.

Through the portrayal of a society where politics are ethnic-based, masculinity being amplified is only one of the few thematic ideas that are present, others include the atonement of sins, resentment, immigration, expectations in a father-son relationship and barriers between different classes or castings. Concentrating primarily on subject of immigration, another significant parallel is present. In a biography of author Khaled Hosseini, Great Neck Publishing discusses Hosseini’s life, “The family subsisted on welfare during their first year in the country, with Hosseini 's father working at a flea market for extra income before finding a job as a driving instructor”. Relating back to the revelation of multiple themes, Hosseini depicts the struggles immigrants face while adapting to a new culture and environment of an unknown abode in The Kite Runner, similarly as he did himself, through Amir and Baba’s life abroad in America. Although Baba was a well reputed man back in his homeland, he too struggled, like Hosseini’s father, to being financially stable, which is evident through his job at the flea market, ultimately representing how they had to start over. Hosseini conveys the struggles of his characters in a fictitious text as a portrayal of his real life experiences which quite pointedly makes the novel more influential for readers to grasp onto the events that take place around the world thereby acknowledging the minorities, such as the