Final Thoughts and the powers that be towards creating narratives.

It is with some regret that I hadn't taken Christine Hong's previous classes during my time as a Lit student since I am going to graduate next quarter, but I felt that the Unreliable Narration class was the most enriching and thoughtful class that I've taken in a while and affirmed my choice for the World Literature and Culture curriculum.

I was pleasantly surprised that we were able to get through all the reading and hit all the lecture points on those reading, and I thought that the strongest we've gotten through was when we've done A Pale View of Hills which lasted all the way through Sacco's Footnotes from Gaza and Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Those three were the most thoughtful reading since we as a class were all able to understand the divide between trauma inflicted upon others by colonial powers such as the United States and the Western world, and how that trauma is realized through who gets to be victimized (such as between Japan/United States vs. the rest of the Pacific Rim/Asia), and who gets to cast the colonial gaze back at others (such as Hamid and Sacco). I was actually impressed at how nuanced the lectures are in highlighting the histories of Palestine and Japan during the times in which they undergo neo-colonial periods of history committed by Israel and the United States, and especially so since we are able to touch upon narrative histories that usually get buried under jingoistic Western World propaganda when it serves their interests.

Footnotes from Gaza has been a realized experience for me as well, since I am affiliated with the Students for Justice in Palestine, and that I had participated in the student demonstration during 96 hours. And boy was that an experience of cognitive dissonance and overt racism spoken by either Pro-Israel folks or "anti-terrorism" people.

However, it was in A Pale View of Hills that I relate most strongly to the class because the lecture touched on issues that I have on how Japan is perceived in the United States and by others that gets perpetuated by people who seem to think there is a line between the acceptable Asian countries (such as Korea and Japan) and the not, and that it contributes to US interests of maintaining a presence within those countries in order to monitor the rest of Asia. As well as challenging narratives in which we ask ourselves who gets culpability during WWII and how there is a dichotomy between who gets to be victimized and who gets to be the savior.

In terms of what I got from the themes of unreliable narration, it challenges what we know to be factual and what is considered fictional. I think what it does is that it makes us consider the power dynamics involved in who gets to tell their story and for which audience it is for, because it is something we take for granted when we consider what is the "real" story and what is constructed to affirm a particular reality.