Red Sparrow: Cold War Redux and the Treatment of Corruption

Examining why many U.S. citizens fail to see President Trump as corrupt, Peter Beinart, in a recent Atlantic article, argues “what the president’s supporters fear most isn’t the corruption of American law, but the corruption of America’s traditional identity.” With this concept of corruption, American viewers of the Russian-set film Red Sparrow may recast our interpretation of the film to examine how it comments on current U.S. politics, even in light of its overt critique of current Russian politics. As an example of the wave of second Cold War films, Red Sparrow suggests that, in a time with traditional identity values at stake, the two current governments of Russia and the U.S. seem more alike than different, both operating at the expense of the individual. Viewers familiar with first Cold War films are initially comforted by familiar images of Russia. However, soon we realize that Dominika Egorova, a disabled former ballerina turned spy, is acting out values we associate with ourselves: a free-thinking individual, she exhibits a larger sense of patriotism and duty to family. These values force her to protect herself by combating the corruption of the Russian government made personal in the criminal actions of her uncle, the Deputy Director of Russia’s external intelligence agency. Because her values align with our dearly-held notions of American ethos, viewers identify with Dominika and, in the process, must confront the inferred necessity of maintaining our values by fighting corruption in our own government. Thus, this essay argues that Red Sparrow compels American viewers to look not outward but inward. Like a mirror, it manipulates our longtime fascination with Russia to direct our gaze at ourselves, to evoke a reevaluation of how we maintain traditionally held values, including concepts of duty and patriotism, even if that loyalty demands contesting our own corruption

The [Latinx] Darling: Lorraine López Reads the Canon

Judith Ortiz Cofer describes “a migrating consciousness” that is explored in a “liminal space” that involves “linguistic decoding” of experience to find that freedom. These concepts can be employed to explain how Lorraine López’s The Darling works to demonstrate how its heroine, Caridad, attains the freedom of selfhood, through both literary and real-life experiences, by exploring, challenging, and then ultimately transcending the oppression faced by females living in male-dominated cultures

Peace Pedagogy from the Borderlines

This chapter is about our combined experience teaching about peace in a course that was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities focused on “Enduring Questions.” One enduring question is “What is peace?” It may seem that the answer is self-evident, only its path to realization tangled, obscure, and impossible to sustain. That is certainly the assumption of our students. Yet the question “what is peace” is an enduring one, without a single answer. Therefore, the underlying assumption of the course we have developed is that concepts of peace are mutable: they change with time, as well as with cultural, religious, and geopolitical perspectives. Our challenge is to resist the urge to arrive at a final definition, or even to develop a map for constructing peace in a modern conflict. Rather, we and our students repeatedly ask ourselves what peace is as we try to unpack its variegated meanings. Our task together is critical, made acute because this will be the only course about peace our students will ever encounter during their tenure at our university. Our goal, at once modest and ambitious, is to instigate thought about peace; to provoke discussion, and exploration; to render peace worthy of seriousness, challenging the old-fashioned stereotypes many of our students may share that peace is a mere relic of a bygone Vietnam “hippie” era or an unobtainable fantasy