scholarly journals Narratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction

10.16993/bbj ◽  
2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Italian Literature ◽  
Marguerite Duras ◽  
War Trauma ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
National Language ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Urban Legends ◽  
Noh Drama ◽  
Mexico Border

Which is the identity of a traveler who is constantly on the move between cultures and languages? What happens with stories when they are transmitted from one place to another, when they are retold, remade, translated and re-translated? What happens with the scholars themselves, when they try to grapple with the kaleidoscopic diversity of human expression in a constantly changing world? These and related questions are, if not given a definite answer, explored in the chapters of this anthology. Its overall topic, narratives that pass over national, language and ethnical borders include studies about transcultural novels, poetry, drama and the narratives of journalism. There is a broad geographic diversity, not only in the anthology as a whole, but also in each of the single contributions. This in turn demand a multitude of theoretical and methodological approaches, which cover a spectrum of concepts from such different sources as post-colonial studies, linguistics, religion, aesthetics, art and media studies, often going beyond the well-known Western frameworks. The works of authors like Miriam Toews, Yoko Tawada, Javier Moreno, Leila Abouela, Marguerite Duras, Kyoko Mori, Francesca Duranti, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Rībi Hideo, and François Cheng are studied from a variety of perspectives. Other chapters deal with code-switching in West-african novels, border-crossing in the Japanese noh drama, translational anthologies of Italian literature, urban legends on the US-Mexico border, migration in German children's books, and war trauma in poetry. Most of the chapters are case studies, and may thus be of interest, not only for specialists, but also for the general reader.

Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in (Post) Colonial Studies

Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Laura Stoler
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research Domain

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.

scholarly journals Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 908-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henig
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Methodological Nationalism

AbstractSituated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.

Theorizing mobility in semiotic landscapes

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan H. O’Connor ◽  
Lauren R. Zentz
Keyword(s):  
Language Ideologies ◽  
National Language ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Public Displays ◽  
Central Java ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Artifacts

This study theorizes connections between semiotic resources and mobility in public displays of language with reference to data from Brownsville, Texas and Betultujuh, Central Java. From an ethnographic perspective, the paper explores the relation of public signage to the mobility of human beings and the mobility of texts in space and time. The semiotic landscape of Brownsville reflects a stratified sociolinguistic space shaped by a history of contact between English and Spanish and the continuing movement of people, goods, and texts across the U.S.-Mexico border. In Betultujuh, by contrast, a semiotic landscape characterized by indeterminacy, amid the influence of national language ideologies and globalizing English, shows evidence of a cultural shift mediated by the circulation of material artifacts and features of language. Based on these analyses, it is argued that porous borders between languages are tied to the mobility of people, texts, and things in a globalizing world.

scholarly journals INTERSECTIONS OF WAR TRAUMA, CULTURE, AND SOCIOANALYSIS IN MENTAL HEALTH INTERVENTION FOR POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 432
Author(s):  
Athena Madan
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Power Systems ◽  
Traumatic Stress ◽  
War Trauma ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Post Traumatic Stress ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
Therapeutic Encounter ◽  
The Impact

<p class="Default">“Refugee war trauma” is a poor adjunct to post-traumatic stress, lacking context for a civilian survivor of war. The “therapeutic mission”, or consolidating a therapeutic agenda with political reconstitution, has its tensions: Such founders embody politics of “emotionology” (Humphrey, 2005, p. 205) bound largely to pharmaceuticals, from a land of “freedom” (where emphasis is on market) and “democracy” (where emphasis is on autonomy of choice, not accountability). Additionally, how people “cope” or “solve problems” is not universal: Therapy speaks of self-empowerment, self-actualisation, and self-control; reconciliation speaks of collective citizenship, national participation, and group reform. Instituting participation in rituals that ‘help” according to predefined norms of an American prescription to suffering speaks more to the globalisation of the American psyche (Watters, 2010; Venne, 1997) than of humanitarian relief. This paper looks at the absence of cultural and socio-political specificities within the dominant discourse on “war trauma”, that are however of ultimate relevance for people affected by war. Using a case example from my own practice with a Rwandan woman living now in Canada, I question the “helpfulness” of post-traumatic stress treatment with this instance of refugee war trauma, and the impact of power systems in mental health care. How can the therapeutic encounter, given its genesis in Eurocentric, patriarchal, enlightenment thought, pause to better consider its potential for injury, especially within contexts of post-colonial genocide? How to avoid a new “mission to civilise”? What tensions to note as the advent of “trauma counselling” seeks more global application and transnational legitimacy?</p>

scholarly journals National language and post-colonial literature in Brazil

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (20) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bethania Mariani ◽  
José Luís Jobim
Keyword(s):  
National Language ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Post Colonial

scholarly journals الإبداعات المغربية باللغات الأجنبية بين سلطة اللغة وسلطة الهوية: قراءة تراتبية

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (80) ◽  
pp. 142-111
Author(s):  
فؤاد بوعلي
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Cultural Alienation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Creative Writings ◽  
The Relationship

أثارت الكتابة الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية العديد من المواقف المتعارضة في الحقلين: الأكاديمي، والثقافي. فقد عرف تاريخ المغرب الحديث سجالاً قوياً بخصوص هوية الكتابات الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية، بين مَن يرى فيها استلاباً ثقافياً، ومَن يرفض ربط الجنسية الأدبية بالانتماء اللغوي، بل وربطها بالمتخيّل الجماعي أكثر من أيّ شيء آخر، ثمّ بالمنتوج الأدبي بوصفه تجسيداً لهذا المتخيّل. فالتعبير عن الذات بلغة أجنبية يطرح للنقاش مفاهيم، مثل: الهوية الثقافية، والسلطة، والخصوصية، والعلاقة بالآخر. وباستخدام القراءة التراتبية التي ظهرت في الدراسات بعد الكولونيالية أمكننا إثبات التلازم بين استعمال اللغة الفرنسية في الإبداع ومسار الفرنكفونية بوصفها إيديولوجيا استعماريةً تفرض لغتها على الشعوب والفضاءات الذيلية. The debate over literary writing in a foreign language has instigated a lot of dichotomous points of view in Moroccan academic and cultural circles. History of modern Morocco has witnessed strong ongoing debates about the identity of creative writings in foreign language. There are those who would consider such writings as cultural alienation. Contrary to that, there are those who refuse to link literary text to language belonging, and link it instead to the collective imaginary and to the literary product as a manifestation of this imaginary. In fact, expressing the self by using a foreign language puts into question notions such as cultural identity, authority, nation-building, and otherness. By applying the theory of hierarchical reading which appeared in the post colonial studies, we have established the relationship between using French in creative writings and La Francophonie as a colonial ideology imposed on people and annexed spaces.

scholarly journals Crossing over; taking refuge: A contrapuntal reading

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine M. Wainwright
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Of Matthew ◽  
Crossing Over ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Global And Local

In this article, I undertake a contrapuntal reading (a type of reading developed within post-colonial studies) engaging the Gospel of Matthew and the current global and local contexts of migration. The work demonstrates the mode and the significance of such readings and ways in which the approach could be brought to bear in a range of contemporary contexts and in relation to any number of current global and local issues.

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