When I was registering for classes it was my graduation day. I was in a rush. I needed to get this done right before I had to leave to go to Rutgers Stadium. I will admit this class was not my first choice nor my second. When both those classes filled up, I remembered back to my advising day with Sultan. How he thought that class was really interesting. I looked at the title “Arabian Nights and Disney days” and I said what the heck mine as well, and having a friend in the class already, so I registered and went off to graduation.
After looking at the title of the class my expectation was it was going to be about the original stories of disney and how they transformed them into the stories that we all saw on tv as kids. Even analyzing some of the films. However, that was not the case. As soon as I walked into the class it was something that I have never thought about before. Growing up I watched Aladdin quite a bit. I never realized that anything was wrong with it or that there were stereotypes in the movie. I was going into a class where I was just brought across this topic. When my Aunt told me there was a warning on Aladdin I literally asked her why when the warning came out. As we started I thought most of this class would be about the movie and saying how wrong it is and all the terrible things that are happening in it. Then we came across the word “Orientalism”.
I will admit this was a word I have never heard about before in my entire life. I have never thought about it, never learned it in school, never came up in the things I watched, books I read. This was the very first time in my life I was brought up to this. It was fascinating reading Said and Ernst how this one word has so many meanings. It means separate things to different people and people view it differently. This is how the outlook on it can be bad. We can see how the “experts” viewpoints were very different and caused a lot of racial conflict. I was really challenged in this class.
When we would have class discussions it was hard to talk because I felt like I was learning new things about the text as people were talking about how they analyzed the work. When I had a thought someone would say something that was like an oh wow moment that made me see the work from a whole new perspective. The kids in our class were very knowledgeable on this topic and they seem to have previous knowledge on the topic. I feel like I am still learning about the topic when everyone speaks.
The works that we read were very hard for me to read. Their writing was written in such weird ways that it was hard to comprehend it. I would take back one tiny thing from the readings that were very long, but when we had class discussions it changed everything. It made my viewpoints different. Hearing people interpret these works differently was cool to see. I never knew one word could have so many different meanings.
