The 2010 Humanities and World Cultures Institute Humanities Fair public lecture will be given Nov. 11.
The event will begin at 7 p.m. in Brewer-Hegeman Conference Center 5A & 5B.
The evening lecture on the subject of “Blue Avatars, White Avatars: In Love and War” by Dr. Jim Deitrick of UCA’s Department of Philosophy and Religion, will explore the origins and use of the concept of Avatar in U.S. popular culture.
Like the ideas of karma and rebirth, the Asian religious idea of the “avatar” has made its way decisively into American popular discourse over the past several years.
Referring at once to our online identities, as well as to a new archetypal protagonist at the center of a recent tide of popular films, television shows, video games, and other popular media, the concept is proving to be fertile ground for the exploration of American identity in the post-modern, post-colonial world.
“Blue Avatars, White Avatars: In Love and at War” explores the manners in which the avatar concept is being used among contemporary Americans to re-conceive their relationships to God, each other, their own “real” and “virtual” selves, and “the Other” formerly colonized and enslaved peoples of the world.
In the process, it also traces the emergence of a new and controversial American myth of redemption, one that seeks, perhaps paradoxically, to redress the wrongs of the nation’s imperialistic past while also preserving the dominance of its European religious and cultural traditions.
