S3 Assignment | Postcolonial Perspectives, Identity, and Power in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book

Clark Kellogg

Theological Thinking

Prof. Dr. EunHye Grace So

L3A1, February 18, 2026

Where shall I start? I wrote a list of experiences I could draw from for this reflection: my first love who was Chinese American; my immersion in the natural world of Alaksa vs. moving in New York City (it was a gut-wrenching move); dinner with a former student who is Korean, and her family in Seoul; trying to fit into Italian culture when visiting my daughter and her family in Italy; living with a Black roommate in a college apartment; teaching in multicultural classrooms in Brasil, China, Portugal, Japan, and the US. But I chose something different. I chose to reflect on my lifelong identity struggle of being “creative vs normal” as it was framed for me.

I am a white, liberal, gray-haired cis man of privilege. People often identify me as a politically conservative successful businessman who was born into a highly educated wealthy family. The only problem with this projection is none of it is true. I was born into a family who mistook my creativity for an inability to pay attention. Teachers told me I had potential, but I didn’t apply myself. As a kid, I felt always out of place or in the wrong place. On the playground, kids called me weirdo. I was living in the wrong world amid people who seemed determined to make me conform to their norms. I tried hard to be like them. I “buckled down and applied myself” as the saying went. I could pass as a graduate of “The School of Should.” But that was a worthless degree.

Perhaps Mowgli’s struggle to find where he belonged was more obvious than mine, yet the search to discover the place where one belongs is common. Finding one’s way, even when well-meaning others offer well-intentioned help, is a solo journey. The help of the powerful, dominant culture is offered with strings attached: be like us. As Mowgli ultimately discovers, we cannot be like others and live our own authentic lives. Even having made choices about one’s identity, there remains for some time, an internal push/pull between the world we choose and the world we leave behind.

For many years I worked in a daycare program in Chinatown San Francisco. The daycare’s founder and director was a white woman who had moved to the city during college to work in a Christian mission program. She ultimately made San Francisco her home and married a Chinese-American man from Chinatown. The daycare was housed in a Presbyterian church of Chinese-immigrants. The curriculum for the daycare was Christian with a blend of Western and Chinese cultural practices and observances.  Mowgli 1:  The program director was nurtured by the Jungle (Chinatown) and longed to be fully accepted as a member there. But with her roots in the Village (United States) she could never fully belong.

The Chinese-immigrant pastors and congregation members were threatened and offended by this white woman and her insistence on making room for both Christianity and the symbols and celebrations of Confucianism and Chinese folk religions. In the hope of gaining acceptance and respect in the United States, they had embraced a conservative form of Christianity and abandoned  the beliefs and religious practices of their homeland. 

Mowgli 2: The Chinese-immigrant church leaders rejected their Jungle roots and bought into the religion of the Village (United States). However they could never fully leave the Jungle (Chinatown).

The non-Christian Chinese-immigrant parents of the daycare children were oblivious to the conflict. They were just happy for the free childcare. Secure in their own family authority, they felt no need to convert, but appreciated many of the Christian values taught and were reassured by the familiar Chinese customs and practices validated in the curriculum. Mowgli 3: These families struggled to maintain their connection to the Jungle (China) while working to survive and succeed  in the Village (United States).

Amanda Weaver

When I read the reflection question this time, I was immediately reminded of my first month as a supervisor at J.C. Penney, particularly as I’m writing this on the first day of Ramadan. I finished my supervisor training (such as it was) just as Ramadan was starting, and one of my first tasks was to enforce breaks. Store scheduling practices had recently come under scrutiny from corporate, and, rather than address the actual complaints, upper management had decided to hyperfocus on compliance.

I was told to make sure everyone took their required breaks when they were scheduled to do so. That sounded simple. As breaks for shifts over a certain length of time are legally required, I did not think much about it at first. I also did not know a thing about Ramadan then, so I did not realize that I was being thrown in the deep end of navigating the intersection of religious identity and labor laws with zero experience. I learned very quickly that this was so much bigger than simply taking a break at the designated time.

While the majority of store employees were white, (Portland, Oregon not being known for its diversity) probably close to 25% of the employees were observant Muslims. That is a large percentage for the location, but the overall approach to “diversity training” was more akin to don’t ask don’t tell than more recent D.E.I. standards. There was no place for employees to go on breaks other than the shared breakroom where the non-Muslims were eating or the locker room with no seating. While technically people could leave at lunch, 30 minutes does not let you go much of anywhere. There was no prayer room; people were praying anywhere they could find space: the lobby of the bathrooms, the locker room, tucked away corners in the stockroom, stairwells. Despite requests not to work closing shifts for the month, Muslim associates were routinely scheduled to close.

I wish I could say that I turned things around, talked upper management in to creating a prayer space, or even just started a conversation. The reality was that I had no real power to do any of those things. I brought it up at every meeting I reported in, but I was ignored and told to try harder or to begin writing people up. Schedule changes were denied under the guise of “undue hardship” to the business.

Watching my coworkers struggle to balance their religious identity with American corporate culture during Ramadan was eye opening. After Ramadan ended, I began noticing all the little ways that this struggle continued. As I continued to get to know my coworkers, I heard a lot about the yearning for belonging in both of two very different cultures that were often at odds with each other, particularly for those who were children of immigrants. Many drew sharp lines in their lives most of the time, dividing their American-ness from their Muslim-ness. They struggled to resist the pressure to conform from both communities and sometimes found that that meant they did not fit comfortably in either. I very much see their struggle mirrored in Mowgli’s struggle to decide where he belongs. What do you keep and what do you leave behind? Furthermore, how do you change the culture you are coming in to so that you can be your authentic self, not just what you are expected to be?

When I married my Iranian-born husband I agreed, in our self-written vows – to “take his culture as my culture.” I didn’t anticipate that I would be more interested in adopting his culture—largely at the insistence of our daughter--than he himself was. This was a difficult and confusing thing to navigate as a wife and mother. Fortunately writing served me in trying to figure out my role.

 When I saw a flyer for a writing workshop called “Exploring Iranian Identity” I was curious as to whether I could attend. The urge to write towards clarity was stronger than my discomfort of not belonging. I can’t even pretend to belong, as a white, blue-eyed, fair haired, non-Farsi speaking woman. I had to claim Iranian identity by marriage, which felt tenuous.

Like Mowgli I wanted to belong to this rich culture, I lived in it, I wanted friends and guides, and I wanted to figure out my place in it. Most of all I wanted to satisfy my daughter’s curiosity that her dad was unable to meet.  I will never fully belong in the way I thought I wanted to. BUT, a dominate theme of the writing workshop was also not-belonging. Of being caught between two cultures - Iranian in America, but also American in Iran.

In the end, through writing my story,  I gained an understanding of my belonging. I could be a conduit for my daughter, an interpreter, a door opener (of a door that she as an “authentic” Iranian-American could go through but  that I could not). I cast myself as a weaver of a family tapestry with an Iranian warp and an American weft that I ultimately stopped weaving. I could hand down this unfinished tapestry for my children to contribute to. And I could go back to my village.

Shiree Dyson

She was in high school when we had the conversation. The conversation in the Black community that you have with the children at some point. The conversation about identity and how you need to move through the world. I didn’t plan to have this conversation with my niece, but I saw where she was heading, and I needed her to hear something before the world said it first. I told her, Yeah, sure, you can identify as Peruvian, that’s your call, but I also know how you look and the world will respond to how you look before you ever open your mouth. She didn’t want to hear it and argued me down. I let it go.

My niece is multi-racial. Her father is African American, and her Mother is Peruvian and French Canadian. My niece presents darker, and her brother presents lighter. He wears his hair in a huge Afro and announces his Blackness in rooms that assume otherwise, claiming all of who he is. My niece moves in the opposite direction. She chose a college in Colorado. She chose circles that are predominantly white. She has worked to live at a distance from anything that reads as Black. The distance has not protected her.

Recently, she called me about a situation at work. She asked for a recommendation for an attorney to discuss a discrimination issue. The very thing she spent years earlier trying to ignore caught up with her. My niece is not confused about who she is because she made a conscious choice.

What I know is that there is a difference between being accepted and belonging. Accepted means you are tolerated in the space. Belonging means the space was made with in mind. What I want for her and what I want for all of my nieces and nephews, regardless of how they choose to show up, is belonging. Real belonging, the kind you don’t have to perform for or shrink yourself to maintain. I can’t make her change how she shows up, but I can continue to hold space for her so that, however she chooses to navigate her life, she finds joy.

This is what Mowgli was pushing back against. He was accepted, but he didn’t belong.

Mowgli, the main character in The Jungle Book, is physically strong and brave, yet constantly reminded that he is different. The villagers later fear Mowgli because he is too wild and animal-like. He does not fully belong anywhere. The view of Mowgli is not unlike how many Black boys are viewed in our society. They are feared and presumed dangerous. The “animal nature” of Black people is well-documented throughout US history, with laws and public sentiment cycling between Blacks being partially human to fully property of another. It wasn’t until about 50 years ago that Black people obtained full rights as humans in the U.S. The questions surrounding Black humanity have not been without consequence. The men who killed Emmit Till could not have seen him as fully human. Till was a 14-year-old boy who was kidnapped and lynched after a white woman claimed Till whistled at her. When his mutilated body was found, Till’s mother decided to have an open casket funeral, showing the world the depravity inherent in the attitude that Black people aren’t quite human.

When Trayvon Martin was killed, my anger at this attitude resurfaced as I watched news reports that tried to show Trayvon as anything other than a bright 17-year-old boy who was robbed of his future by a grown man. The man who killed Trayvon did not see him as fully human and belonging in their neighborhood. During the subsequent racial justice protests, streets filled mostly with young Black voices demanding accountability. Curfews did not stop them. The violence perpetrated against the protestors reminded older Black people of police violence against protestors during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, something that happened as a direct result of Emmit Till’s murder and public funeral. Yet, the damage had been done by post-colonial attitudes in the U.S. Various civil rights groups fought their own battles. Like the jungle factions—wolves, monkeys, tigers—alliances were temporary, and distrust ran deep.

Mowgli’s journey challenges our perception of humanity by showing that being fully human is not singular. It is layered, contested, and evolving. His struggle reflects the postcolonial subject’s negotiation between inherited systems and lived experience. 

The jungle is not only a distant colonial landscape. It is our cities, our protests, our workplaces. And like Mowgli, we must decide whether we will reproduce the law of dominance or imagine a new law rooted in humanity and justice.

 21 February 2026

Rev. CJ Dunford

Week 3 – Rhetorical Use of Text – Postcolonial Perspectives, Identity, and Power in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book

Reflect on a time when you experienced or witnessed the negotiation of multiple cultural or personal identities. How do you see your experience mirrored in Mowgli’s struggle between his animal and human identities, and what insights does this offer regarding the challenges of cultural integration and resistance against dominant power structures?

I worry about this reflection every day. As a queer & transgender person, I constantly feel the incredible freedom of embracing those parts of myself alongside the incessant minority stress and violence that comes along with it. This part of my identity is why I left the church and why I lost nearly all of my family of origin—or maybe they lost me? Along with this, I try my best to be antiracist and to recognize the enormous amount of privilege I carry as a white person. From my perspective, this hybridity becomes even more nuanced when considering my economic class (low middle) and the role I carry as a minister in a predominantly Japanese-American community which are mostly securely upper-middle class. When my family kicked me out for being queer, I found family with Japanese expats living in the US, and I have come to learn that there is a substantial difference between Japanese-American and Japanese people.

Rather than placing too many value-judgments on the many communities of which I have been part, I strive to understand why all of us behave in the ways we do: I have my own deeply-wired psychological responses to the white supremacy of queer- and transantagonism, but that response is very different from my JA friends’ response to the white supremacy of racism and the model minority myth, though I do find ways of empathizing by considering my own hurt. There are moments where, perhaps like Mowgli, I feel a sense of belonging in a few different spaces at the same time, while simultaneously feeling that I don’t belong in any of them.

I wonder if, after the events of the animated version of “the Jungle Book,” if Mowgli was able to embrace his hybridity and still find belonging in the jungle? Did he find belonging among humanity? My sense is that story would be a very complexly beautiful, but also painful one. Reflecting on both integration and resistance against dominant power structures, I try to be very conscious of when queer and trans resistance favors integration, as historically, that has come at the cost of the most intersectionally marginalized in these communities, namely transgender women of color. I also pay close attention to times when white supremacy dictates a surrender of identity for the people of color in my community—especially how I might contribute to that forced assimilation and how I might subvert it, at least in my own heart and actions.

Leonard Bailey

Postcolonial Perspectives, Identity, and Power in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book

Reflective Question

2/20/26 - Week 3 

I have definitely lived some version of that “two worlds” feeling Mowgli goes through.

For me it shows up most in how I move between spaces. Stepping into mainly white or wealthy environments (college classrooms, certain jobs, even some church spaces). It’s not always about people saying something openly racist. Sometimes it’s quieter: the way you feel yourself “code-switching” without even thinking. Like I’ll catch myself changing my tone, my vocabulary, even my facial expressions so I don’t get read as “too loud,” “too intense,” or “too…something.” And it’s weird, because on the outside I’m still me, but inside it feels like I’m translating myself in real time.

That’s where I see Mowgli. He’s not just choosing between being an animal or being human—he’s dealing with two different systems of belonging. In the jungle, he’s loved, but he’s also kind of an exception. In the village, he’s “human,” but they don’t fully accept him either. And that hits, because sometimes integration is sold like it’s this simple thing—just “fit in,” just “adapt,” just “learn the rules.” But the truth is, dominant spaces often want you to integrate on their terms. Like, “You can be here, but don’t bring too much of where you come from.”

And that’s where resistance comes in. Because sometimes the most honest thing you can do is refuse to shrink yourself to make other people comfortable. Mowgli doesn’t just “become civilized” and call it a day—he keeps parts of the jungle with him. He challenges the village’s idea of what a “real human” is supposed to look like. That feels like a metaphor for how marginalized people have to survive: you learn the dominant code so you can move, but you also protect your own identity so you don’t disappear.

So the insight I take from Mowgli is: being “between” isn’t a weakness—it can actually be a kind of power. But it’s also exhausting. Cultural integration isn’t just learning new rules; it’s constantly negotiating dignity, belonging, and whether you’re being invited in as your full self—or only the version of you that’s easier to control.

Deborah Anderson

Reflective Question / Week 3

Feb 20, 2026

Speaking as a woman raised within white Midwestern cultural norms, I was formed in a time and place that valued politeness, harmony, and knowing one’s place. Conflict was avoided, strong emotions were tempered, and belonging was often secured by not standing out too much. I learned early how to read a room, soften my voice, and adapt myself to expectations—skills that were praised as maturity but also functioned as quiet forms of self-erasure. Only later did I begin to recognize how deeply these norms shaped my sense of identity and belonging.

Watching The Jungle Book, I was struck by how Mowgli navigates competing worlds, each with its own rules for survival. The jungle claims him as family but insists on hierarchy and law; the human village offers protection but demands assimilation. Mowgli’s struggle is not simply about choosing between identities, but about recognizing that neither world fully allows him to be himself without surrendering something essential. This tension felt all too familiar--belonging within dominant cultural systems often requires compliance rather than wholeness.

Hotchkiss and Richardson help uncover the power at work beneath structures that often seem harmless or even well-intentioned. Like the jungle imagined through colonial eyes, Midwestern ideas of “goodness” and respectability present themselves as natural and right, while not-always-so-quietly signaling who belongs and who does not. Resistance doesn’t always look like rebellion; sometimes it begins simply by noticing what is being asked of us to fit in. Mowgli’s refusal to fully give himself to either world reflects the hard work of living between identities, holding more than one way of being while pushing back against the pressure to become only what a dominant culture allows. For me, this has meant straddling the culture of the time and place I was shaped by and the truth-teller I strive to be.

Rhetorical Use of Text - Week 3 - Reflective Question - Ogundipe

Assignment | Reflective Question

Reflect on a time when you experienced or witnessed the negotiation of multiple cultural or personal identities. How do you see your experience mirrored in Mowgli’s struggle between his animal and human identities, and what insights does this offer regarding the challenges of cultural integration and resistance against dominant power structures?

For me, this is very common and I am definitely able to find kinship with Mowgli. One example is my name: Victor Akinloye Ogundipe. It is a literal Yoruba and Latin hybrid. The power of naming cannot be underestimated.

I was named in what is a common practice among many Yoruba families, especially Yoruba Christian families, the practice of including a “Christian name" in their children's otherwise Yoruba name. This is an act of integration cultural, religious, and linguistic. The ability to name something that is familiar has real consequences, as we can often feel closer to people and things with familiar names especially in a world of cultural hierarchies. But then again, we would be wise to also consider what is lost in a name that serves as an anchor of integration in the dominant culture.

In my estimation, finding the balance is something that we must attend to seriously as the stakes are high. And, I feel that finding the perfect balance is impossible. For me, this is a small example of the importance of the religious/spiritual. We can't neglect these issues, yet they are bound up in the seemingly ultimate intractability of human politics and identity. Not to be neglected, but not to be invested in as an ultimate source of liberation. Paradoxically, transformative spiritual experience can provide us with the heart to properly face these challenges, as we can approach them ready to give more of ourselves than ever before, with a lighter grasp. We work towards the coming of the Kingdom on Earth simply because of our gratitude for what God has already given, simply because our hearts are moved in such a way that we can't do anything else, because we have already received the greatest love.

A moment where I experienced the negotiation of multiple identities was in balancing my role as both a creative and a leader within Summons Productions. As an artist, I understand expression, experimentation, and growth. As a producer, I am responsible for structure, quality, and execution. Those identities do not always align easily. There are times when I relate to artists still developing, and other times when I have to enforce standards that may limit their immediate access.

This creates a tension between understanding and authority—between being part of the community and leading it. It requires constant navigation of when to relate and when to separate in order to maintain the integrity of what I am building.

This mirrors the struggle of Mowgki in The Jungle Book, who exists between two worlds—animal and human—without being fully accepted by either. Mowgli’s identity is not fixed; it is shaped through conflict, expectation, and survival. He must learn how to navigate both spaces while deciding where he belongs.

That struggle reflects the challenge of cultural integration. Moving between spaces often requires adaptation, but not full assimilation. There is pressure to conform to dominant expectations—whether that is industry standards, cultural norms, or systems of power—but there is also a need to retain identity and perspective.

What stands out is that Mowgli’s strength comes from not fully submitting to one side. He learns from both, but ultimately defines himself outside of their limitations. In the same way, navigating multiple identities can create a broader awareness. It allows for leadership that understands different perspectives while not being controlled by any single one.

This offers an important insight: integration is not about losing identity to fit into a dominant structure. It is about learning how to move within and across systems while maintaining clarity of self. Resistance, then, is not always opposition—it can be the decision to define your own position rather than accept one that is assigned.