Open course ware

KAREN: So what does it mean to be truly authentic, and how does this idea of authenticity impact what it means to be whole or personhood? And so, like, looking at yourself, how do you identify, and how is your identity your chosen identity based on your conceptualization of what it means to be authentically something? Does, like, how you define authenticity and your relationship to authenticity impact how you choose to identify? RACHEL: And sort of as an extension of this-- and these kind of go together. That's why we're saying them together. Do the languages, or does the language that you speak, or that your ancestors spoke affect this concept of authenticity? So if you're the son of someone whose parents spoke a language, but you don't speak it, do you feel less authentic, or does it make you feel more authentic in some manner? Or are there linguistic discourses of power that affect how you perceive the roles that the languages that you speak or that of ...

KAREN: Okay. Today's our last class, and so, in this presentation, we hope to discuss and pull together a lot of different themes that we've talked about over the course of the semester, namely centered around discourses of power. So we've kind of teased apart the idea that there are political, economic, social, and linguistic discourses of power that impact the way people live their lives and how they identify, and hopefully by learning about these different discourses of power, we can find the treasure trove of understanding identity. RACHEL: So in terms of discourses of power, in the political sense, in our readings about the different issues in the Caribbean, we discussed the general topic was colonialization as a discourse of power and how colonialization, in all of these countries, established dominant discourses for racial, social, linguistic, and economic hierarchies of power. We-- and how these hierarchies kind of dictated the structure of the society...