Reflection/"Under The Blood Red Son"

Impressions & Personal Responses: the representation of WWII from an Asian-Pacific Islander (youth) perspective within an American context develops the type of meaning where the indigenous voice of our islands remain silent.

Cultural Theorist, Stuart Hall, in his discourse on "Representation & The Media", defines culture as the way we make sense of the world. The same as Tomi creating a life of the two worlds he exists in-culturally. We develop a shared culture of reality. Tomi takes the American and Japanese cultures to create a hybrid sense of reality. From a Media Studies perspective, the main character ventures towards a deeper understanding of cultural study, the representation gives meaning. Tomi, understands the American Ideas which begin to conflict with traditional ideology. Clearly this book represents the war through the eyes of the Intercultural American child, his experience dealing with language, social-emotional, and socio-historical issues beyond his control. In reading, exploring the true meaning within such a book remains a vital academic pursuit. Developing a framework to understand the meaning withing this book will increase indigenous understanding of outsider perspective on insider experience. Except we have, so far, been left out of the story.

Who gives this text meaning? Media, those in the conversation, and those with the power to give meaning. My personal response and impressions on our reading, the most favored points, points needing clarification, and how these ideas relate to my life drive me to another point from Hall, absence means significance. What I do not read about in the text. I do not hear the Native Indigenous Islander speaking. This "subversion of expectations" drives the question, "What is not said?" or what story is not told. This shifting meaning, according to Hall, subject to the social forces of ideology and power attempts to fix meaning; while these fix meanings create ideology. Ideology closes the meaning flow with Hall suggesting, meaning remains temporary or fluid.

The fixed stereotypes represented in our reading, attempt to fix meaning. Juxtaposed with diversity, society attempts to reverse stereotypes creating a broadening impossibility of fixing bad representation with good (Hall).

Hall concludes, "Closure naturalizes meaning of representation and hides the process". Who produces the ideas created by "Under The Blood-Red Sun"? This relates to my life in the context of Americanism. I can relate to the War in the Pacific. However, do I find an imaginary identification with a character yet? No, I do not see myself in this image yet. I find my self reading from the outside, the story about us-as a people, without relating (Nabobo-baba). I read a story of an Immigrant Japanese Middle school student learning to acculturate into American Identity while a subject of enculturation from his own family.

As I read on, I look forward to opening the practice of representation to explore this story from the inside to examine the relationship between the inside reader and the outside ideas "represented" toward understanding a new dimension, and a new system of inside power.

raa

Source:

"Representation & Media", Hall, Stuart; , July, 09, 2011.

"Knowing and Learning: An Indigenous Fijian Approach"; Unaisi Nabobo-Baba, pp. ix, 31, 79; 2006