Graphic panelling and the promotion of transnational affiliations in Thien Pham’s Sumo

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-291
Author(s):  
Monica Chiu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Football Player ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Football ◽  
The West ◽  
National Differences ◽  
American Football Player ◽  
East And West ◽  
New City

In Thien Pham’s comic Sumo, simple graphics, iconic figures and limited dialogue assist in efficiently conceptualizing the notion of the transitive, the ability to convey meaning, to allow images to translate concepts quickly, including that of transnationalism itself. Character Scott, a failed American football player, relocates to Japan to take up sumo. His physical transnational move and eventual accommodation to a new sport, new city and new friends are reflected in Pham’s loose OuBaPo form: sections of the comic occurring in Japan and those in the United States follow a fairly strict panel count, diminishing evenly as the narrative progresses, suggesting Scott’s amalgamation of and acceptance in the East from his arrival from the West. But neither is privileged in Pham’s use of nearly equal numbers of panels representing Scott’s past in the United States, present in Japan and future in a smooth amalgamation of football and sumo, East and West, strength and flexibility, failure and success. Sumo uses efficient visual approaches – the unique play inherent in OuBaPo as a drawing exercise in constraints, colour-coded panels and iconicity – to accommodate and unify race and national differences.

The contingency of corporate political advocacy: Nike’s ‘dream crazy’ campaign with Colin Kaepernick

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jochen Hoffmann ◽  
Karina Nyborg ◽  
Charlotte Averhoff ◽  
Simone Olesen
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Football Player ◽  
The United States ◽  
Communication Strategy ◽  
American Football ◽  
Political Advocacy ◽  
Epideictic Rhetoric ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Football Player ◽  
Social Cause

An emerging field of research views Corporate Political Advocacy (CPA) as a communication strategy that responds to the challenges of public relations in divided societies. CPA takes a political position in public and, by doing so, appears to deliberately alienate some of its stakeholders. This study challenges the assumption that CPA discards a unifying epideictic rhetoric in favour of agonistic politics. The investigated case is Nike’s Dream Crazy campaign starring American football player Colin Kaepernick, whose protest against race discrimination in the United States sparked a heated public debate. Although the critical analysis of the campaign and responses on Twitter reveal deep political cleavages, Nike is concurrently engaged in unchallenged communication praising the hyper-individualism of a market ideology. The epideictic contingency of Nike’s CPA undermines the social cause ostensibly at the heart of the campaign: the fight against racial discrimination.

The Soviet Economic Challenge

Worldview ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
James Greene
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Capita Rate ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War

The speed with which economics has sped to the front of the Cold War over the past four years has caught the West-used to diplomatic maneuvering and “little wars”-off guard. We have, as yet, no adequate answer to what may well prove to be Communism's most devastating weapon-a Soviet economy producing at a greater per capita rate than the United States. No nation of free men ever rallied round a column of statistics, and yet, clearly, that is where the current battle between East and West has moved.The change, it now seems, was inevitable. When they continue for any period of time, “total” wars, both hot and cold, slip more and more from the grasp of those charged with diplomacy and come to rest upon the impersonal powers of clashing armies, armies either on the battlefields or in the factories.

Melville's Japan and the ““Marketplace Religion”” of Terror

2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-492
Author(s):  
Erik Rangno
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
The West ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
White Whale ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
East And West

Recent criticism has overlooked the importance of Japan to Herman Melville's vision of race and empire in the Pacific, when in fact Melville is deeply committed to exposing the rhetorical strategies by which the United States justified its aggressive intervention in the region in the 1850s. Historical studies of Commodore Matthew C. Perry's forced ““opening”” of Japan to trade with the West tend to ignore the ways in which Perry's campaign itself served as a supplement to violence rather than a circumvention of it. Perry's gunboat diplomacy was informed by two strands of American exceptionalist discourse elsewhere popularized by William H. Seward: the democratization of the globe through commerce and the providential duty to bring Christianity to the barbarians. Seward insisted that the Americanization of the Pacific would unify East and West in contradistinction to the defaced Atlantic world. In Moby-Dick (1851) Ahab inverts these arguments; he rhetorically conflates the white whale and Japan as the twinned nemeses of American commercial interests in the Pacific. By convincing the crew to forgo the Pequod's contracted whaling mission in favor of a romanticized geopolitical revenge plot, Ahab confronts the spectral trace of Western capitalism's origin——the white whale as commodity's cipher. The manufacture and marketability of terror in the Pacific, Melville concludes, incites the Pequod's demise off the coast of Japan, and further evidences the failure of American ambition to prescribe its own limits.

Austrian Neutrality: The Early Years, 1955–1958

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 216-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew E. Harrod
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The West ◽  
East And West ◽  
Soviet Invasion

Austria's status of neutrality contended with crises almost immediately after its founding along with the 1955 State Treaty. First, during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in October 1956, Austrian neutrality faced the threat of conflict when Soviet-Hungarian clashes spilled over into Austria. Then, in July 1958, Austrian neutrality contended with more benign, but nonetheless disturbing, provocations from the Cold War's Western superpower, the United States. As U.S. military planes transited Austria in broad daylight on their way to Lebanon, the cozy, covert Austro-American relationship became all too overt. Although many Austrians believed neutrality would end foreign (particularly Soviet) domination and would ensure an ultimate withdrawal from global upheavals, these events showed that neutrality by itself could not remove the strategic implications inherent in Austria's position in Cold War Central Europe. Indeed, partisan strategic calculations in both East and West had played a significant role in creating Austrian neutrality. As a result, preserving both Austria's neutrality and its links to the West required delicate maneuvering by a small, poorly defended country amid Cold War crosscurrents of Eastern threats and Western sympathies. Already in its early years, Austrian neutrality proved to be less of the holiday from history that many Austrians expected during the festive mood of May 1955.

Comparison of Model Forecast Skill of Sea Level Pressure along the East and West Coasts of the United States

2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 843-854 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrett B. Wedam ◽  
Lynn A. McMurdie ◽  
Clifford F. Mass
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Mesoscale Model ◽  
The United States ◽  
Model Forecast ◽  
The West ◽  
Sea Level Pressure ◽  
Level Pressure ◽  
East And West

Abstract Despite recent advances in numerical weather prediction, major errors in short-range forecasts still occur. To gain insight into the origin and nature of model forecast errors, error frequencies and magnitudes need to be documented for different models and different regions. This study examines errors in sea level pressure for four operational forecast models at observation sites along the east and west coasts of the United States for three 5-month cold seasons. Considering several metrics of forecast accuracy, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model outperformed the other models, while the North American Mesoscale (NAM) model was least skillful. Sea level pressure errors on the West Coast are greater than those on the East Coast. The operational switch from the Eta to the Weather Research and Forecasting Nonhydrostatic Mesoscale Model (WRF-NMM) at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) did not improve forecasts of sea level pressure. The results also suggest that the accuracy of the Canadian Meteorological Centre’s Global Environmental Mesoscale model (CMC-GEM) improved between the first and second cold seasons, that the ECMWF experienced improvement on both coasts during the 3-yr period, and that the NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS) improved during the third cold season on the West Coast.

scholarly journals High Mortality Rate Due to Novel Coronavirus and Deficient Magnesium Intake by Countries

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Masum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mortality Rate ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Infected People ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Human Immune ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

The mortality rate due to COVID-19 is much lower in Asia and Africa than in developed countries in Europe and the United States (West), and this has become an issue that is attracting a great deal of attention. On the other hand, it has recently become clear that the mineral Magnesium (Mg) is significantly related to human immune function, and most people in the West have insufficient Mg intake. Furthermore, it has become clear that the conventional standards for Mg intake are inadequate to indicate insufficient Mg intake. This report shows that regional and national differences in Mg intake are largely responsible for the differences in deaths per infected people (D/IP) caused by COVID-19: the West and Indonesia are considered to have low dietary Mg intakes, resulting in high D/IP; and India･Bangladesh and Africa are the opposite.

Do Americans Really Support Black Athletes Who Kneel During the National Anthem? Estimating the True Prevalence and Strength of Sensitive Racial Attitudes in the Context of Sport

2021 ◽  
pp. 216747952110196
Author(s):  
Lisa Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Football Player ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Football ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Black Athletes ◽  
National Anthem ◽  
Wide Acceptance ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
American Football Player ◽  
List Experiment

Professional athletes in the United States have protested racism in various ways for decades. Kneeling during the national anthem became a prominent form of such activism, ever since American football player Colin Kaepernick popularized the practice in 2016. “Anthem protests” gained renewed attention after the police killing of George Floyd and nationwide unrest in the summer of 2020. This article explores whether public approval of those protests was weaker than scholars and journalists suggested, because survey respondents were reluctant to admit that they considered the protesters disrespectful. A list experiment confirms hidden opposition to anthem protests, especially among people of color, who may feel heightened pressure to support racialized protesters. A second experiment reveals that social desirability bias persists even after respondents hear reassurance that nobody will judge their views. These findings indicate that mainstream surveys misrepresent attitudes toward contemporary racial issues, and that anthem protests have yet to gain wide acceptance in the general U.S. population.

Mafias on the Move

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Varese
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
At Will

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.

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