Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Colter Rios comment
I will be commenting on the “Harpers Weekly: Journal of Civilization “post. I find this picture particularly interesting because this image illustrates an Irishmen be equal to that of an African American. African Americans were heavily scrutinized in this time and this image is portraying that Irish folk were treated equally as bad. I relate this illustration to Dracula in a sense of the immigrants being The Other. Never being an immigrant myself I can never really relate or truly have the same thoughts that they were having that moment in time. This image also is interesting in the way they portray both the Irishmen and the African American profiling them to have certain body language, facial expression, even dressing them in somewhat stereotypical clothing. They even go as far as illustrating the African American being shoeless.
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I'm glad you pointed out the physical portrayal. Up into a good part of the 20th century, people were divided into categories of color on legal documents such as census records. Similarly, in political cartoons and other media, artists (and others, of course) exaggerated certain characteristics so that a group of people became one sort of caricature that represented the whole. By doing this, it's easy to identify subtle physical differences and say "oh, that person's different" and make them the other. The idea of creating an Other is very commonly connected to physical difference--but if everyone were to look the same, it would make it much more difficult. What does that say about us?
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