{"id":3830,"date":"2018-04-21T19:49:26","date_gmt":"2018-04-21T19:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.centre.edu\/cento\/?p=3830"},"modified":"2018-04-21T19:49:26","modified_gmt":"2018-04-21T19:49:26","slug":"dr-osanloos-recommended-reads-for-new-perspectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/2018\/04\/21\/dr-osanloos-recommended-reads-for-new-perspectives\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Osanloo\u2019s Recommended Reads for New Perspectives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

BY CHLOE GAMES – STAFF WRITER <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A late spring snowfall hovered at the window of Dr. Osanloo\u2019s office when she and I sat down to discuss literature. Aware that a month punctuated with campus forums and weighted conversations preceded our conversation, Dr. Osanloo, an Assistant Professor of English, offered a selection of books and films that might encompass both the things that students deal with on our campus and offer a perspective on student life that many Centre students may not understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat excites me about Centre students,\u201d Dr. Osanloo explained, \u201cis that they are curious globally\u2026they care and talk about real issues. What worries me is that to a certain extent so many small liberal arts colleges are cut off, and some of the most powerful things that we can read and watch are things that force us to engage with issues that allow us to get out of that isolation.\u201d This week\u2019s selection of faculty-recommended literature therefore offers students a chance to stray beyond Maine and College Streets, and to adopt a fresh perspective on the student experience, one that may offer unexpected challenges and insights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although she is currently teaching courses in screenwriting and Iranian Cinema, Dr. Osanloo drew material from her Others and Outsiders class when searching for a novel that touches on globally relevant issues that one may encounter inside of a campus. Her first selections are books by the author Mohsin Hamid. in The Reluctant Fundamentalist<\/em>, Dr. Osanloo explains, Hamid tells a story that is very accessible to students, because \u201cA lot of his work navigates some of those ethnic and racial and religious issues\u2026from the standpoint of people the age of our students.\u201d The Reluctant Fundamentalist<\/em> is the story of a college student at Princeton who deals with the everyday sort of emotional and identity issues that a student is bound to encounter, things like having feelings for a classmate and having to communicate with parents that don\u2019t understand his experience. Yet the novel benefits from an additional narrative layer as well; it is narrated: \u201cfrom the purview of someone whose experience is also defined by being an immigrant, an international student, who practices a faith that most students on campus both misunderstand and fail to understand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hamid\u2019s Exit West<\/em> deals with the same issues of immigration that continue to be relevant globally; his main characters are a young refugee couple that flees a city undergoing civil war through a series of fictitious doors. Exit West<\/em>, Dr. Osanloo explains, is fascinating in \u201cHow <\/em>it talks about issues of the world,\u201d weaving together a wealth of fairytales and stories of magical realism in order to relate a truthful, very real experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Osanloo turned to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie\u2019s Americanah <\/em>for her final recommendation. The main character of Adichie\u2019s novel is a student at Princeton who is simultaneously a Nigerian immigrant who is dealing with the very typical issues of an American student, but \u201cThese issues are heightened because they are dealt with from the point of view of an international student who is constantly being forced to explain and justify her experience because of race and because she is from Nigeria, a country that is not understood and misunderstood.\u201d The book is narrated within a duality of prose; the protagonist relates some of her experiences in her blog, while the rest of the time the reader is privileged to experience the world exactly as the main character encounters it. Dr. Osanloo found the variety of prose an interesting component of the novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week\u2019s interview offers a spotlight on film as well: for the student who\u2019s willing to stray from the Netflix queue, Dr. Osanloo recommends The Salesman<\/em> (Osghar Farhadi) and Get Out<\/em> (Jordan Peele). \u201cI\u2019m always looking for connections and things that so many people experience that are heightened by particular issues,\u201d Dr. Osanloo said. To that end, Farhadi\u2019s film follows an Iranian couple in France who are acting in a revival of an iconic American play, Death of a Salesman. Amidst this tangle of monikers, the couple must deal with the post-traumatic stress that follows an assault on the wife, and the husband\u2019s struggle to identify the attacker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our conversation, Dr. Osanloo picked out the unifying component of these books and films: \u201cNone of these characters,\u201d she explained, \u201cshare the privilege of isolation. They are forced to contend with an immediate problem and the reality of how they\u2019re treated at the same time as they try to relate to the world.\u201d The challenge of relating to the world is further explored in Get Out<\/em>, which Dr. Osanloo finds insightful for its exploration of the theme of assimilation. The message that is enacted by the coded racism of the parents in the film, she explains, is that \u201cWe will welcome you, but you must assimilate to our values and leave your own behind.\u201d This idea asks the individual to \u201crevise\u201d their differences in order to be more like \u201cus.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Osanloo praises the film for \u201cmasterful use of the classic tools of the horror genre\u201d and the way it urges us to \u201cthink about the extent to which we ask everyone to assimilate to a prevailing and privileged culture.\u201d On a campus that transitions every semester with the influx and absence of students, issues of identity and community are ever-present. With such a stable element of change warping our campus from one year to the next, there is an endless capacity for impactful change in the way that we construct community within Centre\u2019s campus. For those of us who are seeking solidarity, and for those of us wish to be allies, adopting the perspective of Adichie\u2019s college student or Farhadi\u2019s actor may provide a much-needed stretch in perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY CHLOE GAMES – STAFF WRITER  A late spring snowfall hovered at the window of Dr. Osanloo\u2019s office when she and I sat down to discuss literature. Aware that a month punctuated with campus forums and weighted conversations preceded our conversation, Dr. Osanloo, an Assistant Professor of English, offered a selection of books and films […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3832,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-leisure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cento.centre.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}