scholarly journals Bodies of latent potential: abled imaginary and national belonging in Finnish cultural texts about swimming

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Touko Vaahtera ◽  
Sirpa Lappalainen
Keyword(s):  
National Belonging ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Latent Potential

Black in English: Race, Migration, and National Belonging in Postcolonial Italy

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorgia García-Peña
Keyword(s):  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Transnational Networks ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Cultural Texts

Building on the growing body of scholarship on comparative race and ethnicity, this article considers how immigrants of color and their descendants interpret, translate, and deploy politicized ethno-racial terms (Black, Latinx) to confront racism in contemporary Italy. Through the analysis of cultural texts, including interviews, speeches, and a novel, I argue that terms, ideologies, and racial processes have become both local and global as immigrants and new citizens build transnational networks of contestation from which to confront the violence of coloniality and exploitation that led them to migrate while asserting belonging in the nations in which they reside. 

Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinne Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Family Care ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Disease Treatment ◽  
History Of Disease ◽  
Health And Illness ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Texts

A properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities. Such historical grounding requires taking a long cultural perspective, going beyond traditional medical history – typically the history of disease, treatment and practice – to trace the origins and development of the ideas that underpin medicine in its broadest sense – ideas concerning the most fundamental aspects of human existence: health and illness, body and mind, gender and family, care and community. Historical sources can only go so far in illuminating such topics; we must also look to other cultural texts, and in particular literary texts, which, through their imaginative worlds, provide crucial insights into cultural and intellectual attitudes, experience and creativity. Reading from a critical medical humanities perspective requires not only cultural archaeology across a range of discourses, but also putting past and present into conversation, to discover continuities and contrasts with later perspectives. Medical humanities research is illuminated by cultural and literary studies, and also brings to them new ways of seeing; the relation is dynamic. This chapter explores the ways mind, body and affect are constructed and intersect in medieval thought and literature, with a particular focus on how voice-hearing and visionary experience are portrayed and understood.

The Extended Nation as a Political Project – Hungarian Diaspora Living in Western Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-103
Author(s):  
Ágnes Vass
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Western Canada ◽  
Legislative Elections ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
State Budget ◽  
External Voting ◽  
Diaspora Policy

AbstractPolicy towards Hungarians living in neighbouring countries has been a central issue for Hungarian governments, yet Hungarian diaspora living mainly in Western Europe and North America have received very little attention. This has changed after the 2010 landslide victory of Fidesz. The new government introduced a structured policy focused on engaging Hungarian diaspora, largely due to the nationalist rhetoric of the governing party. The article argues that this change reflects a turn of Hungarian nationalism into what Ragazzi and Balalowska (2011) have called post-territorial nationalism, where national belonging becomes disconnected from territory. It is because of this new conception of Hungarian nationalism that we witness the Hungarian government approach Hungarian communities living in other countries in new ways while using new policy tools: the offer of extraterritorial citizenship; political campaigns to motivate the diaspora to take part in Hungarian domestic politics by voting in legislative elections; or the never-before-seen high state budget allocated to support these communities. Our analysis is based on qualitative data gathered in 2016 from focus group discussions conducted in the Hungarian community of Western Canada to understand the effects of this diaspora politics from a bottom-up perspective. Using the theoretical framework of extraterritorial citizenship, external voting rights and diaspora engagement programmes, the paper gives a brief overview of the development of the Hungarian diaspora policy. We focus on how post-territorial nationalism of the Hungarian government after 2010 effects the ties of Hungarian communities in Canada with Hungary, how the members of these communities conceptualise the meaning of their “new” Hungarian citizenship, voting rights and other diaspora programmes. We argue that external citizenship and voting rights play a crucial role in the Orbán government’s attempt to govern Hungarian diaspora communities through diaspora policy.

Language, Body, Nature: Tackling the Representation of the Kyshtym Disaster in Kate Brown’s Plutopia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamila Gieba
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Nuclear Radiation ◽  
Nuclear Families ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production Site ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Plutonium Production ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Surrounding Areas

The article examines ways of representing nuclear catastrophe in Kate Brown's Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. In 1957 an explosion in the Mayak works - a plutonium production site - led to massive contamination of the surrounding areas. The event remained a closely kept secret till 1992, absent from the public sphere and cultural texts, despite the fact that the scale of contamination was as big as the Chernobyl explosion. One of the reasons for this was the difficulty of representing nuclear radiation. The author focuses on three contexts of this impossibility: in relation to the cognitive theory of the metaphor, the figure of the sick body as bearer of memory, and the invisibility of the nuclear landscape.

Dead Pledges

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie McClanahan
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Credit Scoring ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Microeconomic Theory ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Irrational Behavior ◽  
Cultural Texts

Dead Pledges is a study of our contemporary culture of debt. Examining novels, poems, artworks, photographs, and films produced in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, this book aims to show how US cultural texts have grappled with the rise and fall of the financialized consumer credit economy. It argues that debt is such a ubiquitous yet elusive social form that we can most clearly understand it by looking at how our culture has sought to represent it. Whether popular entertainment or avant-garde art, post-crisis cultural texts allow us to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. Across this range of sites, this book offers an account of the theoretical and political consequences of debt: how it affects our ideas of personhood and morality; how it deploys a language of irrational behavior and risky excess; how it transforms our relationship to property and possession. Bringing together economic history, debt theory, and cultural analysis, Dead Pledges demonstrates how our understanding of the economy can be illuminated by culture. What is at stake in our contemporary culture of debt is not just our measures of economic credibility but also the limits of our imaginative credulity; not just our account of economic character but also our literary characters; not just the money we see but also the way we see money; not just how we pay but also how we imagine getting payback.

Lament as Womanist Healing in Times of Global Violence

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Communal Violence ◽  
Loss And Grief ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Women And Girls

Globally, violence against women and girls is a pandemic—resulting in massive trauma and death. Certain scriptures and cultural texts condone the aggression; others adamantly protest heinous, unjust behaviors. Lament provides an avenue for naming and processing individual and communal violence, grief, and pain. This essay explores lament as response to pain and suffering generated amidst sexual and domestic violence, from a global womanist perspective. After providing a brief overview of my womanist biblical hermeneutic, this essay: (1) explores lament as a response to patriarchal misogynistic violence in Scripture, in dialog with global domestic violence; (2) explores lament embodied in selected Psalms, lamentations, and a lament by Beyoncé; and (3) concludes by invoking lament as a pathway of engaging global, daily loss and grief.

Fat as a Floating Signifier

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-163
Author(s):  
Sabrina Strings
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Fat Phobia ◽  
Fat Stigma

Studies on the development of fat stigma in the United States often consider gender, but not race. This chapter adds to the literature on the significance of race in the propagation of fat phobia. I investigate representations of voluptuousness among “white” Anglo-Saxon and German women, as well as “black” Irish women between 1830 and 1890—a time period during which the value of a curvy physique was hotly contested—performing a discourse analysis of thirty-three articles from top newspapers and magazines. I found that the rounded forms of Anglo-Saxon and German women were generally praised as signs of health and beauty. The fat Irish, by contrast, were depicted as grotesque. Building on the work of Stuart Hall, I conclude that fat was a “floating signifier” of race and national belonging. That is, rather than being universally lauded or condemned, the value attached to fatness was related to the race of its possessor.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document