Religion and Popular culture: Pop culture analysis.

Length: 1200 (double-spaced, excluding title page and any footnotes), Chicago format required. Watch Little Mosque on the Prairie Season 4, Episode 16, “Keeping the Faith” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64PKK5JeXGs&feature=youtu.be) and Episode 17, “Farewell to Amaars.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN44qSeWuOA&feature=youtu.be ) Each episode is 20 mins long. Read Sarah Macdonald’s Holy Cow. Write an essay based on the topic below: REPRODUCING OR CHALLENGING ORIENTALISM? Both Zarqa Nawaz and Sarah Macdonald represent non-western religions within western popular culture formats (a television sitcom and a travelogue). You are to write an essay comparing and contrasting these two representations and consider how they address orientalism. Do they challenge orientalist stereotypes or reproduce them? Orientalism is a specific theory regarding how the west represents the east. Deepa Mehta’s critiques of popular culture representations of India as these will help you recognize some of the ways Nawaz and Macdonald engage with orientalism. Make sure to support your arguments using specific examples from “Little Mosque on the Prairie” and “Holy Cow” (note: this book is not a novel, it is a work of non-fiction. Please do not refer to it as a novel in your essay. You may call it a book, a text or a travelogue). Weak papers will provide Googled definitions of Orientalism that offer reductionist understandings of it and conflate Orientalism with stereotyping, racism, sexism, prejudice and discrimination. Strong papers will demonstrate the complexity of this concept and be able to recognize the many ways it can be used as a lens to better understand the representation of non-western religions in the works of Nawaz and Macdonald.