Cosmopolitan Whiteness

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 363-388
Author(s):  
L. Ayu Saraswati
Keyword(s):  
Upper Class ◽  
Skin Whitening ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Skin Tanning ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Abstract Previous scholarship on the immense popularity of skin-whitening frames this practice as revealing women’s desire to emulate whiteness and upper class White populations. Others have focused on whitening practices to highlight the working of racialized color hierarchy and European/Euro-American hegemony in local and global contexts. This article breaks away from these established theoretical trajectories by arguing that desire for “whiteness” is not the same as desire for “Caucasian whiteness.” Examining advertisements for skin-whitening products in the Indonesian version of Cosmopolitan and skin-tanning products in the American version of Cosmopolitan, the author points out the construction of “cosmopolitan whiteness.” Whiteness is not simply racialized or nationalized as such, but transnationalized. Whiteness is represented as “cosmopolitanness,” embodying transnational mobility.

America’s Signal Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 484-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treasa De Loughry
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Class Status

This article examines how Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) registers a signal crisis of American hegemony through its hyperreal production of an aesthetics of excess, constituted by fragmented subjectivities, a frenetic narrative form, references to the decaying years of the Roman Empire, and irruptions of violence against women. The text’s libidinal investment of personal anguish with public discontent, or a psychopathological fury, is read through Fredric Jameson’s account of third-world allegory as a symptom of the novel’s registration of America’s hegemonic decline. The scalping of several upper-class young women in New York City by their financier boyfriends is thus further examined as an aspect of the text’s aesthetics of excess and use of allegory, which frames the violent interrelation between public discontent and private hubris. The murdered women are read as symbols of American hegemony and class under threat by turbulent financial markets, and hoarding their scalps is represented as a crude and violent attempt by their boyfriends to halt the dwindling value of America’s cultural capital and financial markets. The destabilization of class structures due to turbulent financial markets breeds a semantic confusion between real and symbolic signifiers of class status, a process facilitated by the narrator’s comparison of these women to prototypically American symbols, such as “Oscar-Barbie” statuettes and dolls. Fury’s mapping of Solanka’s cultural products, dolls and masks, from New York to the peripheral nation of Lilliput-Blefescu further actualizes the flow of American cultural and economic power to peripheral regions. This, alongside the text’s problematic characterization of gender and race, is read as evidence of Rushdie as a writer in terminal decline.

Book Review

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-390
Author(s):  
Antonina Levatino
Keyword(s):  
Control Strategies ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Migration Management ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Controversial Nature

Martin Geiger & Antoine Pécoud (eds.), Disciplining the Transnational Mobility of People, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 271 pp., (ISBN 978-1-137-26306-3).In the last decades a very diverse range of initiatives have been undertaken in order to intensify and diversify the ways human mobility is managed and restricted. This trend towards a ‘diversification’ of the migration control strategies stems from the increased awareness by the nation-states of the profoundly controversial nature of the migration management enterprise because of its political, economic, social and moral implications.

Moving to paradise for the children’s sake

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mari Korpela
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Lifestyle Choice ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Children’S Views

Increasing numbers of “Western” families spend several months a year in Goa, India, and the rest of the time in the parents’ passport countries or elsewhere. These “lifestyle migrants” are motivated by a search for “a better quality of life”, and the parents often claim that an important reason for their lifestyle choice is that it is better for the children to be in Goa, where they have enriching experiences and enjoy playing freely outdoors, in a natural environment. This article discusses parents’ and children’s views of this lifestyle. It argues that although the lifestyle sometimes causes moral panic among outsider adults who see regular transnational mobility as a sign of instability, a closer look reveals that there are various aspects of stability in the children’s lives. Paying careful attention to the parents’ and children’s own accounts, and the empirical realities of their lives, enables us to reach beyond normative judgements.

Dmenisions of Human Behavior in The Novel “The Foreigner” By Arun Joshi

IJOHMN ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Abhishek Verma
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Poor People ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
As If ◽  
Available Resources

In the modern age of globalization and modernization, people have become selfish and self-centered.  Feeling of sympathy and kindness towards poor people have almost bolted from the hearts of those who have richly available resources.  They leave needy people running behind their luxurious chauffer-driven cars.  Poor and marginalized people keep shouting for help for their dear ones but upper class people trying to show as if they did not hear any long distant sound crept into their eardrums.  This trauma, agony, pain and sufferings is explored in the novel, The Foreigner.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE AMARNA LETTERS TOWARDS A STUDY OF SYRO-PALESTINIAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE (1). TERMINOLOGY FOR GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 788-832
Author(s):  
Lukas M. Muntingh
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
The Social ◽  
Amarna Letters ◽  
Free People ◽  
Shed Light

Egyptian domination under the 18th and 19th Dynasties deeply influenced political and social life in Syria and Palestine. The correspondence between Egypt and her vassals in Syria and Palestine in the Amarna age, first half of the fourteenth century B.C., preserved for us in the Amarna letters, written in cuneiform on clay tablets discovered in 1887, offer several terms that can shed light on the social structure during the Late Bronze Age. In the social stratification of Syria and Palestine under Egyptian rule according to the Amarna letters, three classes are discernible:1) government officials and military personnel, 2) free people, and 3) half-free people and slaves. In this study, I shall limit myself to the first, the upper class. This article deals with terminology for government officials.

Book Reviews

Transfers ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-149
Keyword(s):  
Sex Workers ◽  
Global City ◽  
Viet Nam ◽  
Community Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Transnational Mobility ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
David Walker ◽  
And Migration

Yogesh Sharma, ed., Coastal Histories: Society and Ecology in Pre-Modern India Debojyoti DasJason Lim, A Slow Ride into the Past: The Chinese Trishaw Industry in Singapore 1942–1983 Margaret MasonXiang Biao, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, and Mika Toyota, eds., Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia Gopalan BalachandranAjaya Kumar Sahoo and Johannes G. de Kruijf, eds., Indian Transnationalism Online: New Perspectives on Diaspora Anouck CarsignolKieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora Yuk Wah ChanChristine B.N. Chin, Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: Women and Migration in a Global City Lilly Yu and Kimberly Kay HoangDavid Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, eds., Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century Daniel OakmanValeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 Vincent LagendijkBieke Cattoor and Bruno De Meulder, Figures Infrastructures: An Atlas of Roads and Railways Maik HoemkeKlaus Benesch, ed., Culture and Mobility Rudi Volti

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