Contemporary Transcultural Auto/Biography and Creative Nonfiction Writing on the Neonomadic Frontier

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianna Dagnino
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Creative Nonfiction ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
New Age ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Life Patterns ◽  
Global Mobility

The present article suggests that a desirable model of creative writing in the era of digital communications and new media, growing transnational flows, neonomadic life patterns (both online and offline), and global mobility is transcultural auto/biography. By this term I identify a form of creative nonfiction particularly suited to recording and exploring the renegotiation of individual cultural identities and the re-shaping of ever more complex subjectivities and collective imaginaries in their efforts to adjust to a new age of digital communication flows, transnational processes, and cross-cultural encounters.

The Postcolonial in Motion: Hijra ila ardi al-ahlam and the Construction of Postcolonial Counterdiscourse

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-311
Author(s):  
Lhoussain Simour
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Cultural Negotiation ◽  
New Space

AbstractThis paper examines the poetics and politics of representing cultural otherness in Sellam Chahidi's travel-inspired narrative Hijra ila ardi al-ahlam. Since Western cultural encounters have developed an overall epistemological outline in which Moroccan cultural identities are framed and often preconditioned to express western perspectives, Chahidi's narrative foregrounds new ways whereby the existing paradigm of interpretation and power relations are disturbed and subverted. Hijra ila ardi al-ahlam shows an inquisitive mode of cross-cultural negotiation in which various ideological and cross-cultural appropriations are dislocated to take on new twists. It is motivated by a strong desire to forge a new space capable of transcending the sociopolitical reality of the motherland but also capable of challenging the unilateral constructions of identity dictated by the ideologies of an Orientalist mindset.

Selfi es

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Ramon Reichert
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Role Expectations ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Human Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Front Stage

The history of the human face is the history of its social coding and the media- conditions of its appearance. The best way to explain the »selfie«-practices of today’s digital culture is to understand such practices as both participative and commercialized cultural techniques that allow their users to fashion their selves in ways they consider relevant for their identities as individuals. Whereas they may put their image of themselves front stage with their selfies, such images for being socially shared have to match determinate role-expectations, body-norms and ideals of beauty. Against this backdrop, collectively shared repertoires of images of normalized subjectivity have developed and leave their mark on the culture of digital communication. In the critical and reflexive discourses that surround the exigencies of auto-medial self-thematization we find reactions that are critical of self-representation as such, and we find strategies of de-subjectification with reflexive awareness of their media conditions. Both strands of critical reactions however remain ambivalent as reactions of protest. The final part of the present article focuses on inter-discourses, in particular discourses that construe the phenomenon of selfies thoroughly as an expression of juvenile narcissism. The author shows how this commonly accepted reading which has precedents in the history of pictorial art reproduces resentment against women and tends to stylize adolescent persons into a homogenous »generation« lost in self-love

South Sea Tales

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
South Sea ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Subject Material

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of ‘The Beach at Falesé, the folktale plots of ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’, and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide. But beyond their generic diversity the stories are linked by their concern with representing the multiracial society of which their author had become a member. In this collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross- cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world.

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