How cultural identity – racial/religious/or national – is represented in Kipling/Lean’s “A Passage to India”/Sidhwa

 Make an argument about how cultural identity – racial/religious/or national – is represented in Kipling/Lean’s “A Passage to India”/Sidhwa. Consider how people identify themselves as belonging to a particular community, and how is that belonging altered/challenged/complicated by cross-cultural encounters in that narrative: either by interracial desire, by gendered or racial inequality, by poverty, or something else. !!!you MUST watch the film, and cite specific scenes and dialogue, and analyze the film’s visual representation, lighting, sound, etc.: it is mandatory to read the readings about film on e-reserve if you want to write about a film!!! Checklist for you: 1. Because this assignment focuses on the skills of close reading and careful analysis as essential components of a persuasive argument, I am interested in seeing how you attend to not just “what is said,” but the particular “way in which it is said.” Pay attention to not just the politics but the aesthetics of the text — its language, imagery, symbolism, its narrative strategy. 2. Be very careful about avoiding vague generalizations (about men, women, society, the world, culture, across centuries, since ancient times, times immemorial, the reader, the authorial intention, the West, Western thought, “ the reader” etc.) — stick to specific claims about your characters, about the book’s representation. Focus on the story you want to tell in your paper about the novel you have chosen to write about. 3. Furthermore, OWN your claims and your interpretations, by using direct language, like “I suggest,” “ I propose,” “I will argue here.” 4. It is also helpful to get a brief plot summary of the text/story you are writing about, and introduce the main characters, in the first or second paragraph. Do not assume your reader knows the text you are writing about: assume the opposite. Present your thesis in the first paragraph. 4. YOU CANNOT USE THE FOLLOWING TERMS IN YOUR THESIS FORMULATION OR ARGUMENT: culture, tradition, society, the reader. 5. Since this is a paper about writing a persuasive argument, you MUST have: 1. A specific, clearly stated, debatable thesis. 2. Organized paragraphs-focusing on one idea each-that tie into your thesis. 3. Concrete textual evidence supporting every claim you make. 4. Detailed analysis in every paragraph, of the language and imagery of textual evidence, explaining how it proves your thesis. 5. Each paragraph should open with a topic sentence that contains a sub-claim from your thesis. It should also contain textual evidence, and an analysis of that textual citation. Your paper will be graded on the basis of these criteria. Be sure to always check if you have demonstrated EVERY claim with concrete evidence from the text. 6. Mechanics: 5-6 pages, double-spaced, regular 1” margins, 12 point Times New Roman font. Please proofread and spell check before submission; typos and misspellings are unacceptable. Please spell the authors’ and characters’ names correctly. Your essay must copy in the question you have chosen to address in the header/before the title of the paper. Compose a short, pithy, and interesting title for the paper. 7. Remember that all quotes longer than five lines should be set off from the main text, indented and single-spaced. Quotes should always be followed be commentary.