Lone Star
"The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."John Sayles film, Lone Star, is about crossing borders, challenging the past, and dealing with the burden of history in both the personal and the public sphere. Painted on a very broad canvas, Lone Star is an epic film touching on many themes, including racism, illegal immigration, the corruption of government and law enforcement, racial identity, multicultural education, and the endurance of love. History casts a very long shadow over the border town of Frontera, and as the characters wrestle with the past and unearth its secrets (both literally and figuratively), the action glides seamlessly between past and present. The past doesn't just haunt the present in this film, it is a vital force shaping identity, both individual and collective. How it represented-in the classroom, in memory, in the history books and in the stories told in the local barroom-has everything to do with the conflicts and power struggles that dominate life in Frontera in the present moment. These essays address questions of history and narrative, exploring the issue of representation and focusing on the ways in which "official" knowledge can eradicate, distort, deny or suppress other ways of kn
Such an instrumentally powerful way of knowing disguises its political instrumentality with the rhetoric of objectivity. Frontiers are barriers and places where access to a new place is granted. This is not to minimize the importance of race and racial politics or to universalize difference by showing that anyone is capable of being corrupted. This is a movie with a number of "universal" themes: conflict between generations, star-crossed love, remembering and forgetting, and the power of family secrets (there are skeletons in the family closets as well the ones buried in the desert). Lone Star and Transformative Multiculturalism One of the roles which multiculturalism can play is to offer a challenge to both politics and epistemology. " (Fiske 251-252)Lone Star illustrates the trajectory of racism in this border town-from the Frontera of the 1950's, where overt harassment and intimidation based on an absolute belief in white supremacy ruled the day, to the 1990's, where political power belongs to a constantly shifting power bloc of economic and political alliances characterized by structural racism and a system of control-control of resources, real estate, political power, and even the minds of the school children. A whole community was destroyed! And who ends up with lakefront property? Buddy Deeds. ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**student of UHHouston, tx. I will give only a brief summary of the plot here, identifying the key characters, highlighting the main conflict and briefly discussing several secondary conflicts which I feel are particularly relevant to the discussion of history and narrative which follows. Agency is one metaphor to name this dialectic: agency appears in the way I take a social construction personally, as my duty, my responsibility, my ethos, my law, my enemy or my love. Often the reaction of the stranger (or immigrant) to this ambiguity is to rapidly assimilate: "Many strangers try to erase the stigma by trying to assimilate. Madan Sarup links the formation of identity to the sense of place. it naturalizes this power by basing it not as the effect of a history of domination but as the effect of being able to know the truth. Identity, Home, the Border and the Frontier Against this complex backdrop of history, of racial division and oppression, of economic hardship and familial secrets, the characters in Lone Star are engaged in defining or developing a sense of their own identity.
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Acceptance Essays
