scholarly journals 4. Diversity, Class, Mobility: Prep’s Cultural Work

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-242
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Work ◽  
Class Mobility

Leisurely Islam

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Deeb ◽  
Mona Harb
Keyword(s):  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Political Economic

South Beirut has recently become a vibrant leisure destination with a plethora of cafés and restaurants that cater to the young, fashionable, and pious. What effects have these establishments had on the moral norms, spatial practices, and urban experiences of this Lebanese community? From the diverse voices of young Shi'i Muslims searching for places to hang out, to the Hezbollah officials who want this media-savvy generation to be more politically involved, to the religious leaders worried that Lebanese youth are losing their moral compasses, this book provides a sophisticated and original look at leisure in the Lebanese capital. What makes a café morally appropriate? How do people negotiate morality in relation to different places? And under what circumstances might a pious Muslim go to a café that serves alcohol? This book highlights tensions and complexities exacerbated by the presence of multiple religious authorities, a fraught sectarian political context, class mobility, and a generation that takes religion for granted but wants to have fun. The book elucidates the political, economic, religious, and social changes that have taken place since 2000, and examines leisure's influence on Lebanese sociopolitical and urban situations. Asserting that morality and geography cannot be fully understood in isolation from one another, the book offers a colorful new understanding of the most powerful community in Lebanon today.

Book Reviews

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-166
Author(s):  
Johannes Görbert ◽  
Russ Pottle ◽  
Jeff Morrison ◽  
Pramod K. Nayar ◽  
Dirk Göttsche ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Alexander Von Humboldt ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Review Finding ◽  
University Of Massachusetts

German Literary Anthropology: Across Cultures, Across Genres Stefan Hermes and Sebastian Kaufmann, eds., Der ganze Mensch – die ganze Menschheit: Völkerkundliche Anthropologie, Literatur und Ästhetik um 1800 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 318 pp., 10 illustrations, €89.95What’s Old Is New Again, Mostly Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds., New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 325 pp., $90Complex Journeys around the World and through Literary and Intellectual Traditions around 1800 Johannes Görbert, Die Vertextung der Welt: Forschungsreisen als Literatur bei Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt und Adelbert von Chamisso. Weltliteraturen/World Literatures, Schriftenreihe der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, vol. 7 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), vi, 426 pp., 8 illustrations, €109.95Travel as Cultural Work Gary Totten, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 170 pp., $26.95Colonial Encounters between Africa and Europe—with Special Reference to Austria and Switzerland Manuel Menrath, ed., Afrika im Blick: Afrikabilder im deutschsprachigen Europa, 1870–1970 (Zurich: Chronos, 2012), 329 pp., €43Social Formations and Literary Forms in Long Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing Mary Henes and Brian H. Murray, eds., Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 248 pp., 21 illustrations, $95Travel Accounts of Polar Regions and Colonial Discourse Mike Frömel, Off ene Räume und gefährliche Reisen im Eis: Reisebeschreibungen über die Polarregionen und ein kolonialer Diskurs im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2013), 288 pp., €29.50.“Imagined Geographies” and the Navigation of British European Identity Katarina Gephardt, Th e Idea of Europe in British Travel Narratives, 1789–1914 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 248 pp., 15 illustrations, $104.95Terminal and Threshold: Experiencing the Airport Christopher Schaberg, Th e End of Airports (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 216 pp., 25 illustrations, £13.99NOVEL REVIEW Finding Purity Jonathan Franzen, Purity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 563 pp., $28

On Strike and On Stage: Migration, Mobilization, and the Cultural Work of El Teatro Campesino

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Integrated Analysis ◽  
Stage Migration ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Picket Line ◽  
A Performance ◽  
Teatro Campesino

This essay looks at the role of labor activism through the cultural work of El Teatro Campesino, the theater company that emerged from the farmworkers’ strike led by Cesear Chavez in Delano, California, during the mid-1960s. Through makeshift performances along the picket line, the farmworkers and their creative visionary, Luis Valdez, innovated Chicano/a performance and created an activist aesthetic that has continued to influence Chicano/a performance and art. Their productions, which started as small improvisational actos, drew from a wealth of transnational influences as well as from a larger proletariat and activist theater tradition. However, El Teatro Campesino adapted these techniques to their local resources. The result created a unique forum that enabled promotional education about unions and workers’ rights to exist side-by-side with themes of self-reflection and criticism concerning the risks of identity politics. The essay explores the methods by which El Teatro Campesino questioned and critiqued ethnic identity and argues for a more complex approach to their earlier picket-line entertainment. It proceeds to consider the importance of cultural production for labor mobilization, and argues for a more integrated analysis of the relationship between activism and art.

White Writers, Race Matters

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Jay
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Writers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Taking Action

White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.

Realism and the Middle-Class Balancing Act

2019 ◽  
pp. 463-483
Author(s):  
Patrick Chura
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
William Dean Howells ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
The Subject

This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.

Rape Appraisals: Class Mobility, Social Geography, and Sexual Morality Tales in Ghana, South Africa, and Rwanda

2021 ◽  
pp. 009579842110080
Author(s):  
C. Shawn McGuffey
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Coping Strategies ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Stressful Events ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Class Mobility ◽  
Rape Survivors ◽  
Interdisciplinary Scholarship

Interdisciplinary scholarship in violence and trauma studies suggest that a person’s interpretation of stressful events contours how the person will respond. It is through the two-part appraisal process that survivors determine how they will cope. This project utilizes an identity-based approach to demonstrate that survivors use group-based ideologies such as social class, geography, gender, sexuality, and, for some, race to appraise their accounts of violence, assess their coping strategies, and manage traumatic events. Using the cross-cultural accounts of 146 Black Ghanaian, South African, and Rwandan women rape survivors, the findings extend the appraisal approach by highlighting how survivors in this study utilized sexual morality tales to construct a variety of appraisal accounts to interpret their assaults and to justify their coping strategies. I call these appraisals opportunities, possibilities, limitations, and solidarities. These differing appraisals demonstrated that social milieu contours the psychological experience of violence and can engender both parallel and divergent interpretations across social class and cultural contexts. Last, the implications of these findings for comparative sexual assault studies, theories of traumatic coping, gender and development, and intersectionality are discussed.

scholarly journals Supervisors’ Leadership Styles’ Influence on Foreign Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in a Cross-Cultural Work Setting: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824402199454
Author(s):  
Bernard Gumah ◽  
Liu Wenbin ◽  
Maxwell Akansina Aziabah
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Styles ◽  
Leadership Style ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Moderated Mediation ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Adaptation Theory ◽  
Foreign Teachers ◽  
Communication Challenges ◽  
Positive Effect

Leadership style impacts on the manner and frequency of feedback transmission. However, communication challenges between superiors and subordinates originate from cultural differences, which undermine the usefulness of feedback. The study tested leadership style’s effect on self-efficacy through a moderated mediation approach, examined through the lens of the cross-cultural adaptation theory. Path analysis conducted on data from 281 foreign teachers in Chengdu, China, revealed that there is a positive effect of Chinese supervisors’ leadership styles on foreign teacher’s self-efficacy. Leadership style similarly has an influence on the nature of feedback. And the nature of feedback in turn mediates leadership style and self-efficacy. We establish in particular that transactional and transformational leadership styles, through the nature of feedback, influence self-efficacy of foreign teachers. Moreover, the association between the nature of feedback and self-efficacy is moderated by the perceived value of feedback. Employees’ perceptions are also found to be crucial in determining the value of feedback. It is thus imperative for supervisors and managers working with foreigners as subordinates to figure out when and how to provide valuable feedback. We conclude with suggested areas for further research.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document