Angels in America revolves around the story of two struggling couples: Louis Ironson and his lover Prior Walter, and lawyer Joe Pitt and his wife Harper. Louis Ironson comes from a very stereotypically confounding background: he is a jewish gay man in mid 1980’s Brooklyn. A product of his circumstances, Louis is found in a […]
Read More →Archive for November, 2019
Xenophobia at an All-Time High
Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow is a post-apartheid narrative that is circled around three main subjects: Aids, Xenophobia, and Suicide. Although South Africa has come a long way since then, it is apparent by this very recent video that xenophobia within the country is still as resilient as ever. African born foreigners in South Africa, specifically in Johannesburg, […]
Read More →Euphoria
Our introduction to Hillbrow is during a scene of madness – intense joy and intense pain competing to dominate the hearts of Hillbrowans. The blurb describes Hillbrow as the “microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring and painful”. HBC’s hit show Euphoria follows the lives of high-schoolers as they struggle to ground their identities in […]
Read More →Born a Crime
Welcome to Our Hillbrow lays its foundation in a dark part of South African history. Hillbrow, a town that has recently escaped the Apartheid, still abounds with xenophobia and discrimination, legacies of its dark colonial past. In the attached video, Trevor Noah gives a personal account of his childhood in a comedic manner. During the […]
Read More →If Only for a Moment
Welcome to Our Hillbrow opens with the line “[i]f you were still alive, Refentše, child of Tiragalong, you would be glad that Bafana Bafana lost to France in the 1998 Soccer World Cup fiasco” (1). The omniscient narrator continues shortly after, stating, “[y]ou would remember the last occasion in 1995, when Bafana Bafana won against […]
Read More →What Happens When We Die?
Welcome to Our Hillbrow bring us to the dichotomous world of post-apartheid South Africa, into the neighbourhood of Hillbrow where problems abound and inequality is made even more apparent. In our previous reading in this course, one of the conflicts that Yan Lianke paints a strong image of in his The Dream of Ding Village […]
Read More →Chernobyl Intentions
The convener’s post mentions that Dream of Ding Village explores the theme of authority and morality. The above post is a short clip from the HBO mini-series Chernobyl, based on true events. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 occurred due to an error made during a safety test of an RBMK-type nuclear reactor. The spread […]
Read More →Bloodborne
“We are born of blood, made men by blood, undone by blood. Fear the old blood.” – Provost Wilhem’s adageBloodborne, a action-horror game developed by FromSoftware, has a reputation for its brutal difficulty and obscure storytelling, and many pass it off as a niche game for those with masochistic tendancies. However, those who truly imbibe […]
Read More →Love for Life
Full-length feature adaptation of Dream of Ding Village from 2011, directed by Gu Changwei and starring Zhang Ziyi and Aaron Kwok. More here. I’ve embedded it to begin with Ma Xianglin’s performance. You can find commentary from a previous class member here.
Read More →Dream of Ding Village
Dream of Ding Village is a storyline, but also an assessment of the spread of the disease in a given space. Through the journey of a man and a family, Lianke takes the readers through the process of discovery, healing, and cooperation within a society. But also, through a process where factors or boundaries such […]
Read More →