Alterity

1234 Words3 Pages

Brave New World through the eyes of the reader, and even John, depicts their culture as a vastly colorful and peculiar one. Culture is one of the main issues looked at in the Post-Colonial lens and by focusing on culture it becomes easy to see the alterity of the colonizers from the colonized stand point (). What one culture believes and how they behave is vastly different from another cultures beliefs and behaviors. Brave New World shows alterity it that pronounce its exotic and erotic ways that, to readers, seems to mean a lack of morals (). This all became this way from their setting: Their cultural background, their social context, where they are placed and how the society was constructed. The comparison between people on the reservation, which symbolizes our culture and the colonized, and those in the Brave New World, which symbolizes the futures culture and those colonizing, is a method used in the Post-Colonialist lens to instill a view of the indigenous as victims rather than as wrong-doers (). The way the Brave New World functions seems so awful and inappropriate to us today, but looking back 40-50 years, today's society would have had the same sense of alterity to them. It's an indication of the direction our society slowly moves towards but also an extreme case of the direction society is moving in to explicitly get the point across. Huxley highlights that we are slowly letting aspects of our setting colonize our values today and then shows us what that might look like: A world we don't even recognize or know, a culture that displays alterity from our culture now. The Brave New World is exotic in that it has the view as a world of happiness, no one is ever really sad or sick, everything is efficient and convenient, for... ... middle of paper ... ...amily and we get so caught up in our environment that we don't notice the growing emptiness inside us and then, just like that, we lose something that was truly fulfilling. Because of the place and development of this society, it has formed a certain alterity or “otherness” to it's culture that is vastly different than what we see today. It is all used as a blown up concept of what life is today, and even in the 1930s when the book was written. Huxley is showing where we have placed ourselves as a society and how we have set the direction of it for the future. Aldous Huxley sets out and makes true connections and assumptions that with time our own society is becoming more exotic from one generation to the next. We change in sexual morality, what we value changes completely and we begin to see our own alterity in the culture we have so blindly and carelessly shaped.

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