The paper presents an analysis of Deepa Mehta’s film trilogy (Water, Fire, Earth) through the concept of a border identity. The Protagonists of Deepa Mehta’s Film Trilogy may serve as examples of border identities or identities “in-between” (cf. Homi Bhabha). The “in -betweeness” is illustrated through the lens of various categories and their intersections – especially those of gender, sexuality, social status, religion (religious community) and tradition/individual freedom in general. For all the films, overstepping traditional taboos is typical, be it the mythological taboos, those of collective communal identities, traditional gender roles and stereotypes or compulsory heteronormativity. Within these frameworks, the dominance of the power discourses and the (in)visibility of the marginalized ones is thematized. While the main characters of the three film stories are female, they (in some cases) only seemingly play a leading role and the real acting heroes are the men. The most obvious example is the story of the Earth where the moral conflict takes place between the two male heroes. The author also notices the figuring of the females as mostly victims of the social order and male violence. However, this critical remark is not articulated to question the real aspect of the discrimination, but rather to point to the risks of a simplified picture of victimization of women which have been, in the context of Asian studies, analyzed by Chandra Talpade Mohanty and other postcolonial theorists., Blanka Knotková-Čapková., and Obsahuje bibliografii
The Patent of Toleration of the year 1781 cleared the way for activities of two Protestant churches in the Habsburg Monarchy. In the two borderland regions chosen for analysis - the regions of Děčín and Šluknov - the Protestant inhabitants were affected by the religious influences from Saxony that acquired various forms. From the period before the year 1620 there was, exceptionally, preserved the Lutheran religion, whose followers visited churches on the Saxon side of the border. Also, the regions were continuously settled by Saxon immigrants who were not organized within the structures of the Augsburg confession. Only after the commencement of industrialization and the subsequent wave of Saxon immigration was made possible the establishment of independent Protestant choirs. Absolutely exceptional was the Lutheran choir of Saxon officials in Podmokly that was founded after railroad had been finished in 1851. Already before the year 1850 the mission of the renewed Unity of Brethren from Herrnhut instigated the popular religious movement. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, religious propaganda of the movement „Away from Rome“ (Los von Rom), in many cases supported from Saxony, found response in these regions. The typology of religious influences from Saxony and their manifestations on the Bohemian side of the border, established on the basis of the examples of Děčín and Šluknov regions, could be used for the nineteenth century also for other borderland regions inhabited predominantly by German-speaking population.