MEHRZAD BOROUJERDI, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996). Pp 256.

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-571
Author(s):  
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
The West ◽  
Ontological Difference ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Authentic Identity ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Beliefs And Values

Mehrzad Boroujerdi's Iranian Intellectuals and the West explores the works of three generations of Iranian writers and academics who contributed to the formation of a counter-Western “nativist” discourse. It opens with an exposition of the concepts that constitute the theoretical grid of the book and provide the title of its first chapter. “Otherness, Orientalism, Orientalism in Reverse, and Nativism.” Informed by contemporary critical theories, Boroujerdi argues for the centrality of the “other” to the formation of modern self-identity. Re-encapsulating the main theses of Said's Orientalism, he recounts that “the Islamic world came to be perceived as the embodiment of all that was recently left behind in Europe: an all-encompassing religion, political despotism, cultural stagnation, scientific ignorance, superstition, and so on” (p. 7). He then explains “Orientalism in reverse,” a concept formulated by the Syrian critic Sadik al-Azm. Preferring this clumsy concept to “Occidentalism” or “self-Orientalizing,” Boroujerdi defines Orientalism in reverse as “a discourse used by ‘oriental’ intellectuals and political elites to lay claim to, recapture, and finally impropriate their ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ identity” (pp. 11–12). As a counter-narrative of Orientalism, this discourse “uncritically embraces orientalism's assumption of a fundamental ontological difference separating the natures, peoples, and cultures of the Orient and the Occident” (p. 12). Boroujerdi attributes the popularity of Orientalism in reverse to the “seductive lure of nativism,” which is defined as “the doctrine that calls for the resurgence, reinstatement, or continuance of native or indigenous cultural customs, beliefs, and values” (p. 14). Surprisingly enough, Boroujerdi does not divulge that this seductive and pervasive “ nativism” has no discursively significant equivalent in Iranian cultural politics.

Proximity and Distance: Palestinian Women’s Social Lives in Diaspora

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-50
Author(s):  
Celia E. Rothenberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
West Bank ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Synchronic Comparison

This article focuses on how women in two Palestinian diaspora communities—one in Jordan and the other in Toronto—experience social ties to those they have left behind in the West Bank and to others within their adopted communities. This analysis allows for a synchronic comparison of the nature and effects of these diaspora locations on areas of social life that are central to women’s daily lives. It is my hope that this study will complement other studies that focus on how living in a particular diaspora location diachronically, or across generations, affects an immigrant or exile community’s family and community formations (see, for example, S. Abu-Laban, “Family”; Yousif). My examination here thus draws out how the diversity of diaspora locations shapes, and is shaped by, women’s experiences.

scholarly journals Discursive practice and the negotiation of psychiatric pathology in Egypt

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Coker
Keyword(s):  
Moral Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Psychiatric Practice ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
The West ◽  
World Views ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Diagnostic Categories ◽  
Other Hand

Modern biomedical psychiatry is the product not only of scientific enterprise but also of the progressive secularisation and medicalisation of moral life in the West (Jimenez, 1987). Psychiatry is an evolving cultural product. Its diagnostic categories represent pathologies rooted in Western notions of self, identity, normality and abnormality (Gaines, 1991). Psychiatric practice in Egypt, on the other hand, is the product of two different and often incompatible world views, namely Western psychiatry and Egyptian concepts of self, identity, normality and abnormality. The task of the psychiatrist in Egypt is to negotiate symptoms and diagnoses in a way that is sensitive to the demands of these two competing cultural streams. Analysis of this process provides a unique view of the ways in which culture can have an impact on professional psychiatry in any society or ethnic context.

Comparative Analysis of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s Travels to European Countries

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Aysel KAMAL ◽  
Sinem ATIS
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Young Lady ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
The West ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Turkish Literature ◽  
Art And Architecture

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962) is one of the most controversial authors in the 20th century Turkish literature. Literature critics find it difficult to place him in a school of literature and thought. There are many reasons that they have caused Tanpinar to give the impression of ambiguity in his thoughts through his literary works. One of them is that he is always open to (even admires) the "other" thought to a certain age, and he considers synthesis thinking at later ages. Tanpinar states in the letter that he wrote to a young lady from Antalya that he composed the foundations of his first period aesthetics due to the contributions from western (French) writers. The influence of the western writers on him has also inspired his interest in the materialist culture of the West. In 1953 and 1959 he organized two tours to Europe in order to see places where Western thought and culture were produced. He shared his impressions that he gained in European countries in his literary works. In the literary works of Tanpinar, Europe comes out as an aesthetic object. The most dominant facts of this aesthetic are music, painting, etc. In this work, in the writings of Tanpinar about the countries that he travelled in Europe, some factors were detected like European culture, lifestyle, socio-cultural relations, art and architecture, political and social history and so on. And the effects of European countries were compared with Tanpinar’s thought and aesthetics. Keywords: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Europe, poetry, music, painting, culture, life

The Proximity of Other Skins

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Korea ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Existing Frames ◽  
The Voice

Transnational films representing intimacy and inequality disrupt and disgust Western spectators. When wounded bodies within poverty entangle with healthy wealthy bodies in sex, romance and care, fear and hatred combine with desire and fetishism. Works from the Philippines, South Korea, and independents from the United States and France may not be made for the West and may not make use of Hollywood traditions. Rather, they demand recognition for the knowledge they produce beyond our existing frames. They challenge us to go beyond passive consumption, or introspection of ourselves as spectators, for they represent new ways of world-making we cannot unsee, unhear, or unfeel. The spectator is redirected to go beyond the rapture of consuming the other to the rupture that arises from witnessing pain and suffering. Self-displacement is what proximity to intimate inequality in cinema ultimately compels and demands so as to establish an ethical way of relating to others. In undoing the spectator, the voice of the transnational filmmaker emerges. Not only do we need to listen to filmmakers from outside Hollywood who unflinchingly engage the inexpressibility of difference, we need to make room for critics and theorists who prioritize the subjectivities of others. When the demographics of filmmakers and film scholars are not as diverse as its spectators, films narrow our worldviews. To recognize our culpability in the denigration of others unleashes the power of cinema. The unbearability of stories we don’t want to watch and don’t want to feel must be borne.

Normative tensions in filial caring for a mother with dementia: A narrative perspective

Dementia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 147130122110140
Author(s):  
Ina Luichies ◽  
Anne Goossensen ◽  
Hanneke van der Meide
Keyword(s):  
Adult Children ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Beliefs ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Beliefs And Values

This article aims to gain insight in the normative struggles of adult children caring for their ageing mother living with dementia. Two Dutch autobiographical books written by siblings recording their own caregiving experience were analysed using a narrative design. Children appear to understand their normative concerns through six fields of tension. Our analysis shows that filial caregivers describe two distinct approaches to deal with these normative tensions. One approach aims to preserve the child’s pre-existing personal beliefs and values, but also causes the child to demonstrate rigid and uncompromising behaviour at odds with the needs of their parent. The other approach is more reflective and flexible, prioritizing the needs of the vulnerable person over previously held values, providing an opportunity for better care. We conclude that caregiving children have to find their way between being faithful to their principles and showing moral flexibility.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Informed Consent: Ezenwa–Ohaeto between Past and Future Uses of Pidgin

Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
First Language ◽  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.

The First Capitulation: France and the Rhineland Crisis of 1936

1956 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. C. Parker
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Armed Attack ◽  
The West ◽  
German Army ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
Demilitarized Zone ◽  
Peace Settlements

ON March 7, 1936, German troops entered the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. Germany thus violated Articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles and Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty of Locarno of 1925. Remilitarization moved forward for about one hundred miles the areas of concentration for any German armed attack in the west and advanced the defensive line that could be held by the German army. It severely weakened France and, in consequence, all the other powers concerned to maintain the Paris peace settlements and to preserve the peace of Europe.

Managing to Avoid Innovation

1999 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Vaux ◽  
M. P. S. F. Gomes ◽  
R. J. Grieve ◽  
S. W. Woolgar
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
Manufacturing Companies ◽  
Small Companies ◽  
Small Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Technology And Innovation ◽  
Company Culture ◽  
The One

This paper addresses differences in the way that the problems of small UK firms are construed by policy makers on the one hand, and by the executives of small companies on the other. The authors employ a discursively-based analysis of interviews carried out with managers of small manufacturing companies in the West London area. They suggest that SME executives construe their attitudes to advanced technology and innovation within the terms of some clear, but implicit management values which tend to lead to the perception of innovation as a risk to be managed, rather than an opportunity to be exploited. It is suggested this has significant implications for attempts to change small company culture.

Unveiling the subject behind diversity: Exploring the micro-politics of representation in ethnic minority creatives’ identity work

Organization ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrizia Zanoni ◽  
Annelies Thoelen ◽  
Sierk Ybema
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
The Other ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
The West ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Creative Subject

Much literature on the cultural industries celebrates ethnicity as a source of creativity. Despite its positive connotation, this discourse reduces ethnic minority creatives to manifestations of a collective ethnic identity automatically leading to creativity, creating a paradox of creativity without a creative subject. Approaching creatives with an ethnic minority background as agents, this article investigates how they self-reflectively and purposely discursively construct ethnicity as a source of creativity in their identity work. Empirically, we analyze interviews with well-established creatives with an ethnic minority background active in Belgium. Most respondents construct their ethnic background as ‘hybrid’, ‘exotic’, or ‘liminal’ to craft an identity as creatives and claim creativity for their work. Only few refuse to discursively deploy ethnicity as a source of creativity, crafting more individualized identities as creatives. Our study contributes to the literature on power and ethnicity in the creative industries by documenting ethnic minority creatives’ discursive micro-struggle over what is creative work and who qualifies as a creative. Specifically, we show their counterpolitics of representation of ethnicity in the creative industries through the re-signification of the relation between the ‘west’ and the ‘other’ in less disadvantageous terms. Despite such re-signification, the continued relevance of the discourse of ethnicity as a key marker of difference suggests that ethnicity remains a principle of unequal organization of the creative industries.

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