| Response sheet 13, for class, Tuesday | |
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Many of you encountered children’s literature and juvenile literature about Panama and Greenland in your hometown library catalogs, so with that inspiration we will start this week with the socialization of children and youth into empire. 1. How did Butterworth’s narrator create personal ambition — i.e., one should always aspire to something more than a mere baseline of self? What was the baseline? How should a young man exceed that baseline? 2. Stratemeyer’s narrator casually stated that “natives” somehow had no reason to miss all those people supposedly lost to natural disasters. What other dehumanizing racist nonsense was casually scattered in this sample passage for teenaged American boys joining the book’s imperial adventure? What image of Filipinos was created? Who/what supposedly were they? 3. How have you yourself been socialized into any kind of notion of American empire, hidden or otherwise? Children’s books? YA books? Something else? (This question applies even to those of you who are international students.) |