Academic literature on the topic 'Lone Ranger (Fictitious character)'

In 1933, The Lone Ranger was a favorite on U.S. radios. In 1946, the show debuted on the new medium of television and became a cultural icon in the States. The Lone Ranger character was a mysterious, heroic cowboy. He wore a black mask and did good with humble anonymity. At the end of each episode, after a successful, selfless exploit, as our hero rode off on his white steed with his trusted Indian companion, grateful townspeople would ask, “Who is that masked man?”

Abstract This paper aims to show the representation of Native Americans in Sherman Alexie's short story The Trial of Thomas-Builds-the-Fire, which is part of his story collections The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993). The main character, Thomas-Builds-the-Fire, represents native Americans. This paper will analyze Thomas as a subaltern who was oppressed by white hegemony. The presence of fairy tales as media voicing out Thomas' thoughts and feeling as the subaltern interprets something deeper. The present writer will use Gayatri C. Spivak's theories which are subaltern and representation, to analyze the forms of Native American representation. The result shows there are two forms of representation used in the story. They are "to represent," meaning "the idea of representing something," and "re-present," meaning "the idea of bringing back." However, both forms of representation stated in the story failed to make the subaltern speak or be heard. Kata kunci: fairy tales, Native American, representation, subaltern Abstrak Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk menunjukkan representasi penduduk asli atau pribumi Amerika dalam cerpen Sherman Alexie yang berjudul The Trial of Thomas-Builds-the-Fire, yang merupakan bagian dari buku kumpulan cerita pendek karya Sherman Alexie yang berjudul The Lone Ranger dan Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993). Penduduk asli atau pribumi Amerika direpresentasikan oleh tokoh utama Thomas-Builds-the-Fire. Tulisan ini akan berfokus pada Thomas sebagai subaltern yang tertindas oleh hegemoni kulit putih. Kehadiran dongeng sebagai media yang menyuarakan pikiran dan perasaan Thomas sebagai subaltern memaknai sesuatu yang lebih dalam. Untuk menemukan bentuk-bentuk representasi penduduk asli atau pribumi Amerika akan diterapkan konsep Subaltern dan Representasi oleh Gayatri C. Spivak. Hasil dari penelitian ini adalah ditemukannya dua bentuk representasi di dalam teks, yaitu representasi (represent) sebagai “yang mewakili” dan representasi (re-present) sebagai “yang menghadirkan kembali”. Kedua bentuk representasi yang muncul di dalam teks gagal membuat subaltern bersuara maupun didengar. Keywords: dongeng, pribumi Amerika, representasi, subaltern

I open with two philosophical gestures that point to the two quandaries that motivate this paper. First, the (im)possibility of biography—an account of some one's life—a documenting that usually, for better or worse, takes the lives of individuals as exemplary to the community, thus setting them apart from, rather than making them part of, the community of counterparts. And second, the problem discourse itself creates: When saying what we mean, does the message always reach its “indicated address” or audience? In critical theory, discourse often seems to circumvent rather than “treat” the material at hand. In keeping with the purpose of this special issue—to speak to comparative racialization—I would like to begin with a brief challenge to this project. I find “comparative racialization” an oxymoron: a promise to render the “races”—bundled into their minoritizations—separate but equal to demonstrate the effectiveness of the happy colored folks' companionability. Good racial feeling, after all, comes in twos (think Lone Ranger and Tonto, Amos and Andy, Sonny and Cher, etc.). My critique here is not meant to be facetious or disrespectful, since I intend to follow the rigorous investigation that I am charged with: bringing pressure to bear on the “comparative” in association with “racialization.” To understand what is being examined here, it is necessary to challenge the possibility of doing anything here. The minute we grasp that two racialized entities can be compared, does a set of proofs—such as, but not limited to, ideas of belonging and community and, more generally, ideas of a literature or literatures, a culture or cultures—then confront us? What if the subjects we choose to engage with are not subjects at all? What if we begin our query with some attention to what makes the subject work? Or, better yet, what tale would we tell about it, if we could? Could we provide a series of ontological proofs about its being that would ground itself in the happy narrative of place, space, and race?

Literaccy kuzyni „Reservation dogs”: analiza komparatystyczna utworów Louise Erdrich i Shermana Alexie Artykuł przedstawia analizę komparatystyczną współczesnej prozy rdzennych Amerykanów (powieści Love Medicine i The Bingo Palace Louise Erdrich oraz wyboru opowiadań The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Shermana Alexiego) oraz serialu Reservation Dogs Taiki Waititi i Sterlina Harjo. Celem artykułu jest wykazanie podobieństw na poziomie konstruk­cji młodych bohaterów w tekstach literackich i dziele filmowym z uwzględnieniem takich kategorii jak dekonstrukcja stereotypów Indian, humor umożliwiający przetrwanie (survival humor – Lincoln 1993) oraz kwestii gatunkowych. Ta ostatnia kategoria obejmuje opowieści o dojrzewaniu, opowieści drogi, opowieści o powrocie do domu (homing novels – Bevis 1987) oraz realizm magiczny. Wykorzystana metodologia to studia kulturowe, postkolonializm i postmodernizm. Autorka artykułu zamierza wykazać, że wiele środków stylistycznych wykorzystanych do konstrukcji postaci w serialu Reservation Dogs pojawiło się znacznie wcześniej w kanonicznych utworach współczesnej prozy rdzennych Amerykanów i twórcy serialu wydają się podejmować inteligentny dialog z tradycją literacką, ponieważ podobnie stawiają na afirmację współczesnej kultury indiańskiej, podkreślają jej związki z popkulturą i bardzo często wprowadzają czarny humor, oddając rdzennym Amerykanom sprawczość i kontrolę nad własną opowieścią. ABSTRACT The article is a comparative analysis of contemporary Native American fiction (Louise Erdrich’s novels Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace, Sherman Alexie’s short story collec­tion The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), and the series Reservation Dogs by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo. The aim of the article is to indicate similarities in the construction of young protagonists of the selected literary texts and the series, with an emphasis on Indian stereotype deconstruction, survival humour and the genres. This last category encompasses bildungsroman, road novel/story, homing novel/story and magical realism. The methodology used in the article includes cultural studies, postcolonialism and postmodernism. The author of the article wants to argue that many stylistic devices used in the character construction in Reservation Dogs have appeared much earlier in the canonical works of Native American fiction and Waititi and Harjo seem to enter into an intelligent dialogue with the literary tradition because similarly to it, they affirm contemporary indigenous culture, stress its connection with popular culture and very often introduce the black humour which turns Native Americans into subjects of their narratives and gives them back control over their own stories.

The Garden of Eden is the original surveillance state. God creates the heavens and the earth, turns on the lights, inspects everything that he has made and, behold, finds it very good. But then the creation attempts to acquire the surveillant properties of the creator. In Genesis 3, a serpent explains to Eve the virtues of forbidden fruit: “Ye shall not die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3: 4–5). Adam’s and Eve’s eyes are certainly opened (sufficiently so to necessitate figleaves), but in the next verse, God’s superior surveillance system has found them out. The power relationship Genesis illustrates has prompted many – the Romantics in their seditious appropriations of Paradise Lost, for instance – to question whether Eden is all that “good” after all. Why was God so concerned for Eve and Adam not to see? For that matter, why was he not there to intercept the serpent, but so promptly on the scene of humanity’s crime? Various answers (that God planned the Fall because it would enable him to demonstrate supreme love through Jesus, that Eve and Adam were wilfully wrong to grasp for equality with the Creator of the Universe, that God could not intervene in the temptation because it would compromise humanity’s free will) do not alter the flaw in God’s perfect garden state. Consciousness of this imperfection surfaces repeatedly in Western utopian narratives. The very existence of such narratives points to a humanist distrust in God as social engineer; the fact that these secular Edens are themselves often flawed suggests both a parody of the original Eden and an admission that humans are not up to the task of social engineering either. Thomas More’s Utopia and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – one the ostensible depiction of a new Eden, the other an outright dystopic inferno – address the association of Eden (or the Creator) with surveillance, and so undermine the ideality of the prelapsarian Garden. The archetypal power relationship, that of All-Seeing Creator with always-seen creation, is reconfigured sans God: in Utopia, with society itself performing the work of a transcendent surveillance system; in Blade Runner, with the multi-planetary Tyrell corporation doing so. In both cases, the Omnisurveillant is stripped of the mitigating quality of being God, and so exposed as oppressive, unjust, an affront to the idea of perfection. Like Eden, the eponymous island of Thomas More’s Utopia is a surveillance state. Glass, we read, “is there much used” (More 55). Surveillance is decentralised and patriarchal: wives are expected to confess to their husbands, children to their mothers (More 65). Each year, every thirty families select a “syphogrant”, whose “chief and almost … only office … is to see and take heed that no man sit idle, but that every one apply his own craft with earnest diligence” (More 57). In the mess halls, “The Syphogrant and his wife sit in the midst of the high table … because from thence all the whole company is in their sight” (More 66). Elders are ranged amongst the young men so that “the sage gravity and reverence of the elders should keep the youngsters from wanton licence of words and behaviour. Forasmuch as nothing can be so secretly spoken or done at the table, but either they that sit on the one side or on the other must needs perceive it” (More 66). Not only are the Utopians subject to social surveillance, but also to a conviction of its inescapability. Believing that the dead move among them, the Utopians feel that they are being watched (even when they are not) and thus regulate their own behaviour. In his preface to The Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham extols the virtues of his surveillance machine: “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated instruction diffused – public burthens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied – all by a simple idea in Architecture!” (Bentham 29). As Foucault points out in “Panopticism”, the Panopticon works so well because the prisoner can never know when she or he is being watched, and this uncertainty compels the prisoner into constant discipline. Atheist Bentham had created a transcendent surveillance system that would replace God in (he trusted) an increasingly secular society. Bentham’s catalogue of the Panopticon’s benefits is something of a Utopian manifesto in its own right, and his utilitarianism, based on the “greatest-happiness principle”, was prepared to embrace the surveillance system so long as that system maximised overall happiness. Perhaps Thomas More was a proto-utilitarian, prepared to take up the repressive aspects of panopticism in exchange for moral reform, health preservation, the invigoration of industry and the lightening of public burdens. On the other hand, Utopia is widely read as a deliberately ironic representation of the ideal state. Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out that More “remained ambivalent about many of his most intensely felt perceptions” in Utopia, and he offers the text’s various ironising elements (such as the name of More’s fictitious interlocutor, Hythlodaeus, “well learned in nonsense”) as evidence (Greenblatt 54). Even the text’s title undermines its Edenic vision: as Louis Marin argues, “Utopia” could derive equally from Greek ou-topos, no-place, or eu-topos, good-place (Marin 85). More’s ambivalence about Utopia – to the extent of attributing his account of No-place to a character called Nonsense – suggests his impatience with his own flawed social vision. While Utopia is ambivalent in its depiction of the perfect state, more recent utopian narratives – Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), for instance, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – are unequivocally ironic about the subordination of the individual to the perfect state. The Bible’s account of human society begins with Eden and ends with Apocalypse, in which divine surveillance reaches its inevitable conclusion in divine judgement. The utopian genre has undergone a very similar trajectory, beginning with what seem to be sincere attempts to sketch the perfect state, briefly flourishing as Europeans became first aware of Cytherean islands in the South Pacific, and, more recently, representing outright apocalypse (as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale [1986] and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner [1992]), or at least responding pessimistically to human attempts at social engineering. Blade Runner’s dystopic inversion of biblical creation illustrates an enduring distrust in both human and divine attempts to establish Eden. The year is 2019 (only one year off 2020, perfect vision); the place is Los Angeles, the City of Angels. Corporate biomechanic Eldon Tyrell manufactures a race of robots, “replicants”, who are physically indistinguishable from humans, capable of developing emotional responses, but burdened with a four-year self-destruct mechanism. When the replicants rebel, their leader, Roy Batty, demands of Tyrell, “I want more life, Father”. Tyrell is not only “Father”, but “the god of biomechanics”; and Batty is simultaneously a reworking of Adam (the disaffected creation), Lucifer (the rebel angel) and Christ (as shown in the accompanying iconography of crucifixion and doves). The Bible’s leading actors are all present, but the City of Angels, 2019, is unmistakeably not Eden. It is a polluted, dank, flame-spewing dragon of a city, more Inferno than human habitation. The film’s oppressive film noir atmosphere relays the nausea induced by the Tyrell Corporation’s surveillance system. The Voight-Kamff test – a means of assessing emotional response (and thus determining whether an individual is human or replicant) by scanning the pupils – is a surveillance mechanism so intrusive it measures not only behaviour, but feelings. The optical imagery throughout the film reinforces the idea of permanent visibility. The result is a claustrophobic paranoia. Blade Runner is unambiguous in its pessimism about human attempts to regulate society (attempts which it shows to be reliant on surveillance, slavery and swift punishment). It seems unlikely that the God of Genesis is specifically targeted by this film’s parody of the Creator-creation power relationship – its critiques of capitalism and environmental mismanagement are much more overt – but by configuring its dramatis personae in biblical roles, Blade Runner demonstrates that the paradigm for omnisurveillant creators comes from the Bible. In turn, by placing Los Angeles, 2019, at such a distant aesthetic remove from Eden, the film portrays the omnisurveillant creator unrelieved by natural beauty. Foucault’s formulation of panopticism, that power is seeing without being seen, that being seen without seeing is disempowerment, informs all three texts – Genesis, Utopia and Blade Runner. What differentiates them, determines how perfect each text would have its world believed to be, is the extent to which its authors approve this power relationship. References Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon; or, The Inspection House (1787). In The Panopticon Writings. Ed. Miran Bozovic. London: Verso, 1995. 29-95. Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism”. In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (1977). New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 195–228. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1980. Marin, Louis. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Trans. Robert A. Vollrath. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990. More, Thomas. Utopia (1516). In Susan Brice, ed. Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut. United States, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Harley, Alexis. "Resurveying Eden: Panoptica in Imperfect Worlds." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/02-harley.php>. APA Style Harley, A. (Aug. 2005) "Resurveying Eden: Panoptica in Imperfect Worlds," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/02-harley.php>.