Proposal: Culture and Identity - Essay Example

When the topic of culture is approached from the point of view of an artist, the language becomes engaged as a history of that culture, a retelling of the philosophies that have defined the social world of that culture and the ways in which that social world has changed. Through the work that I am currently doing, the language of my culture and the changes that are taking place through immigration into a new culture are explored through the stories that I am revealing to the viewer. In a piece of work that is considered a central piece that influenced the civil rights movement, Frantz Fanon discusses the importance of language in the changes that have taken place within the cultures in which colonization has been an affecting event.

The initial affect of colonization is that the people within whom a colony has come to be established are often then taught that they are inferior, thus creating a philosophical shift in the pride with which a culture holds itself (2). This inferiority is then used in order to change the colonized peoples, thus shifting the nature of the culture. It is the language of the conquering people, that is the people who come in and take lands in order to establish colonies, that manifests through their actions that is the strongest communication that occurs towards those whose lands have been invaded.

No matter whether the colonization happens through war, through assumed sovereignty, or through economic arrangement, the colonizing people will have the economic strength to overwhelm the people who are indigenous to the land. In the process of conquering, the communication is always clear that there is an assumption of superiority of the colonists. This communicates a sense of inferiority (Ono 75). Through this communication comes the demand for change within the indigenous population. Some resist that change and try to preserve the precious and precarious nature of the culture, while others will wish to embrace that change, to adapt to the new culture and become one of those that they see as superior.

In doing this, they lose themselves and become lost in between the two cultures. During immigration, the opposite type of inferiority/superiority dynamic comes into play. The immigrant has most often chosen to leave their home culture in search of something that they feel they are missing, thus when they arrive in the new environment they will try to adapt to the culture that they saw as superior to the culture from which they arrived. The inferiority/superiority dynamic is dependant upon power.

Where a colonist has come in to a land with force in order to take the resources of the area, an immigrant has come to a land through a need, a state of vulnerability from which they are asking the new land to find a way to provide through that need, whether it be through education, employment, or safety (Heron 24). Western cultures, through the power of the consumerist nature, have a great deal of power. The consumerist philosophy has swept through the world, globally overtaking many cultures until it can be witnessed that there is a concerted effort to Westernize each culture with which it comes into contact (Ritzer 84).

The powerful rhetoric that is created through the media has created a world that sees the Western world through rose colored glasses, the imagery that is promoted suggesting that the materialistic nature of the consumer aesthetic leads to a