scholarly journals Negotiating Cultural Identity in The Inheritance of Loss

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-74
Author(s):  
Chiou-Rung Deng

This paper seeks to explore three modes of cultural identification presented in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. With three intersecting plotlines, the novel focuses on three divergent modes of cultural identification in different spatio-temporal contexts. The first kind of cultural identification is imbued with a sense of foreignness, exemplified by the judge, Jemubhai, whose cultural identity is deeply shaped by imperialist ideology during British colonization of India. As Indian culture is negated by the colonial power, Jemubhai adheres to English cultural identification and disavows his Indianness. The second mode of cultural identification revolves around the issue of cultural authenticity in the diasporic context for Biju, a young migrant, illegal worker in various restaurants in New York. To survive in a foreign country, Biju forces himself to transgress cultural borders, which disconcerts Biju and further prompts him to pursue cultural authenticity. The third mode highlights Sai’s and Gyan’s trajectories of cultural identification. Just as Sai, Jemubhai’s granddaughter, embodies the idea of in-betweenness, Gyan, Sai’s math tutor, manifests the desire to escape narrow nationalism. Both Sai and Gyan evoke the potential of crossing borders. Juxtaposing the three modes of cultural identification, Desai’s novel explores the process of negotiating cultural identity and gestures towards a field of border-crossing identity.

Author(s):  
Quratulain Shirazi

This article is based on a study of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a novel by a Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid.  The novel is based on the  story of  transformation of an expat Pakistani living in New York from a true cosmopolitan to a nationalist. The article will explore the crisis of identity suffered by the protagonist in a new land where he reached as an immigrant  student and worker. However, he experienced a resurgence of nationalist and patriotic sentiments within him as 9/ 11 happened in 2001.  The force of American nationalism that was imperial in nature, resulting in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iran, triggered resentment in the protagonist who decided to leave America and went back to the country of his origin, Pakistan. During his stay in America, the protagonist redefined fundamentalism as an imperial tendency in the American system while rejecting the accusations hurled towards him of an Islamic fundamentalist. The article will explain that there is a loss of cosmopolitan virtue  in the post 9/11 era and the dream of universal peace and harmony  is shattered due to unbridled  state ambitions to invade foreign territories.   The article will conclude with the assertion that the loss of cosmopolitanism and reassertion of national identities give way to confrontation and intolerance destroying the prospects of peace and harmony in a globalized world.


Author(s):  
Charles Brockden Brown

One of the earliest American novels, Wieland (1798) is a thrilling tale of suspense and intrigue set in rural Pennyslvania in the 1760s. Based on an actual case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the novel employs Gothic devices and sensational elements such as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism. The plot turns on the charming but diabolical intruder Carwin, who exercises his power over the narrator, Clara Wieland, and her family, destroying the order and authority of the small community in which they live. Underlying the mystery and horror, however, is a profound examination of the human mind's capacity for rational judgement. The text also explores some of the most important issues vital to the survival of democracy in the new American republic. Brown further considers power and manipulation in his unfinished sequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, which traces Carwin's career as a disciple of the utopist Ludloe.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmeen George ◽  
Shanika Karunasekera ◽  
Aaron Harwood ◽  
Kwan Hui Lim

AbstractA key challenge in mining social media data streams is to identify events which are actively discussed by a group of people in a specific local or global area. Such events are useful for early warning for accident, protest, election or breaking news. However, neither the list of events nor the resolution of both event time and space is fixed or known beforehand. In this work, we propose an online spatio-temporal event detection system using social media that is able to detect events at different time and space resolutions. First, to address the challenge related to the unknown spatial resolution of events, a quad-tree method is exploited in order to split the geographical space into multiscale regions based on the density of social media data. Then, a statistical unsupervised approach is performed that involves Poisson distribution and a smoothing method for highlighting regions with unexpected density of social posts. Further, event duration is precisely estimated by merging events happening in the same region at consecutive time intervals. A post processing stage is introduced to filter out events that are spam, fake or wrong. Finally, we incorporate simple semantics by using social media entities to assess the integrity, and accuracy of detected events. The proposed method is evaluated using different social media datasets: Twitter and Flickr for different cities: Melbourne, London, Paris and New York. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compare our results with two baseline algorithms based on fixed split of geographical space and clustering method. For performance evaluation, we manually compute recall and precision. We also propose a new quality measure named strength index, which automatically measures how accurate the reported event is.


Author(s):  
Huiqun Huang ◽  
Xi Yang ◽  
Suining He

Timely forecasting the urban anomaly events in advance is of great importance to the city management and planning. However, anomaly event prediction is highly challenging due to the sparseness of data, geographic heterogeneity (e.g., complex spatial correlation, skewed spatial distribution of anomaly events and crowd flows), and the dynamic temporal dependencies. In this study, we propose M-STAP, a novel Multi-head Spatio-Temporal Attention Prediction approach to address the problem of multi-region urban anomaly event prediction. Specifically, M-STAP considers the problem from three main aspects: (1) extracting the spatial characteristics of the anomaly events in different regions, and the spatial correlations between anomaly events and crowd flows; (2) modeling the impacts of crowd flow dynamic of the most relevant regions in each time step on the anomaly events; and (3) employing attention mechanism to analyze the varying impacts of the historical anomaly events on the predicted data. We have conducted extensive experimental studies on the crowd flows and anomaly events data of New York City, Melbourne and Chicago. Our proposed model shows higher accuracy (41.91% improvement on average) in predicting multi-region anomaly events compared with the state-of-the-arts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alia Afiyati ◽  
Divya Widyastuti ◽  
Yoga Pratama

In a literary work, two characters can be narrated as the attention center that contains the cultural identity from certain generation. Meanwhile, a symbol actually can cause an interaction within characters. This research discusses about cultural identity and symbolic interactionism reflected in a novel. There is a novel entitled “Recipe for a Perfect Wife” by Karma Brown that tells about two female characters that are represented as a housewife from different generation. This research uses descriptive qualitative as the research methodology and content  analysis as the method in analyzing the object of the research, a novel entitled “Recipe for a Perfect Wife”. This research also uses the intrinsic approach to analyze the characterization, plot, and setting. This research reveals two kinds of a housewife. They are a housewife and working woman, and a full-housewife. This research finds five cultural identities in the past and present time that is related with a housewife reflected by two female characters in the novel by using cultural identity theory by Stuart Hall. This research also reveals the symbol and memory even three concepts of symbolic interactionism that is mind, self, and society based on symbolic interactionism theory by George Herbert Mead.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacey Frisch ◽  
Sarah Jones ◽  
James Willis ◽  
Richard Sinert

BACKGROUND COVID-19, an illness caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, affected many aspects of healthcare worldwide in 2020. From March to May of 2020, New York City (NYC) experienced a large surge of cases. OBJECTIVE The authors aimed to characterize the amount of illness experienced by residents and fellows in 2 NYC hospitals during this time period. METHODS This was a cross-sectional observational study. An IRB-exempt survey was distributed to emergency medicine housestaff in May 2020 and submissions were accepted through August 2020. RESULTS 64 residents and fellows responded to our survey (a 62% response rate). 42% of responders tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Most residents experienced symptoms that could be consistent with COVID-19 however few received PCR testing. Fevers and/or chills along with loss of smell and/or taste were the most specific symptoms for COVID-19, with p-values <0.05. All 13 housestaff who reported no symptoms during the study period tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. CONCLUSIONS Our study demonstrated that the rate of COVID-19 illness among emergency department housestaff is much higher than previously reported. Further studies are needed to characterize illness among medical staff in emergency departments across the nation. The high infection rate among emergency medicine trainees stresses the importance of supplying adequate PPE for healthcare professionals.


2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 591-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Mackey

Working with young readers, aged 10 to 14, as they responded to narrative texts in a variety of media (Mackey, 2002), I observed a recurring phenomenon: In a variety of ways they repeatedly stepped in and out of the fictional universe of their different stories. Some examples will perhaps give the flavor of this experience: Two 14-year-old girls playing Starship Titanic alternate between lively engagement in the narrative world of the story and stepping outside the fiction to console themselves, “Oh well, if we die, we can just start again.” A 10-year-old girl speaks of alternating between the novel and the computer game of My Teacher is an Alien, using the novel as a source of game-playing repertoire. Two 10-year-old boys look at the DVD of the film Contact, learning how the special effects of an explosion scene were composed, and commenting on how their new awareness of scene construction would affect how they view the film in the future. As I recorded and analyzed numerous examples of such behaviors, I was struck by a common element of interpretive activity on the boundaries of the fictional universe. Sensitized to the topic, I began to notice, and then to collect, examples of contemporary texts that foster various forms of such border crossing, in and out of the diegesis, the framework of events as narrated in the text. This article explores how an awareness of this aspect of contemporary texts may enhance our understanding of interpretive processes and expand what happens in literature classes.


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