{"id":505,"date":"2021-04-04T23:33:26","date_gmt":"2021-04-05T03:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/?p=505"},"modified":"2021-04-11T22:38:56","modified_gmt":"2021-04-12T02:38:56","slug":"societal-isolation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/2021\/04\/04\/societal-isolation\/","title":{"rendered":"Societal Isolation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Baldwin published\u00a0Giovanni\u2019s Room<\/em>in 1956. However, the society that I grew up in seems to have barely progressed since then. A lot of what Baldwin mentions in\u00a0Giovanni\u2019s Room<\/em>, I feel, is still valid for the Indian society today. I will not really touch upon American society in this blog post, since I feel that I have a very narrow and surface level view of it which stems from merely watching or reading the news or living in the \u201cNotre Dame bubble.\u201d The men in Guillaume\u2019s Bar are not very fond of David. Baldwin writes that the men at the bar \u201ccould not, somehow, speak to us as they spoke to one another, and they resented the strain we imposed on them of speaking in any other way. And it made them furious that the dead center of their lives was, in this instance, none of their business.\u201d (Baldwin 119) Sadly, this reminds me of the country I grew up in, and the people I grew up around. A famous comedian once described India as the country of the white people of the brown people. In South-East Asia, India is touted\u00a0to be the most developed and progressive country in general. It was among the first to decriminalize gay couples and people of the same gender having sex (yes, there was an old law against it which the British had created.)\u00a0However, the country I grew up in now seems very homophobic to me. Just like the people at the bar in\u00a0Giovanni\u2019s Room,\u00a0<\/em>my teachers shamed a boy in my class. They told\u00a0him that he was\u00a0\u201ctoo effeminate\u201d and my family members made sure to pass a demeaning comment towards anyone on the TV that remotely fit the gay stereotype. The attitude of the people at the Bar in Baldwin\u2019s novel highlights how the Indian society is still stuck where Paris was in 1956. People are still uncomfortable around same sex couples and make the couples feel like they are different in a negative way as they do not conform. Same sex couples in India, are sadly made to feel like they are separate and the \u201cother\u201d part of society which must not be spoken about positively. This makes\u00a0Giovanni’s Room<\/em>\u00a0still relevant towards the Indian society. However, the question is when will such a novel become irrelevant to current times?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Baldwin published\u00a0Giovanni\u2019s Roomin 1956. However, the society that I grew up in seems to have barely progressed since then. A lot of what Baldwin mentions in\u00a0Giovanni\u2019s Room, I feel, is still valid for the Indian society today. I will not really touch upon American society in this blog post, since I feel that I have … Continue reading Societal Isolation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3921,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[489038],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-giovannis-room"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3921"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":506,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions\/506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}