scholarly journals “‘It ain’t have no sort of family life for us here’”: Community and its Discontents in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Andrew Greenwood
Keyword(s):  
Social Services ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Black Immigrants ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Paul Gilroy ◽  
The Many ◽  
Cultural Theorist

<div>Sam Seldon's The Lonely Londoners depicts an emergent collectivity of black immigrants who lead literally and metaphorically subterranean lives in 1950s Britain. Against the backdrop of a city undergoing an ambivalent transition from colonial metropole to postmodern cosmopolis, Seldon's "boys" remain largely inscrutable to and estranged from not only white Londoners but also one another. Critics have associate a depoliticized preoccupation with the everyday and eschewal of critical consciousness in Seldon’s work with widely critiqued features of Anglophone modernism. The present analysis suggests several reasons why political collectivity remains elusive to Seldon's black male immigrant characters. Specifically, they face discriminatory access to the labor market and social services, loci of possible solidarity with working-class white Londoners where formal political resistance might be coordinated. These systemic pressures combined with an atmospheric racism cause many of the boys to internalize the racialist, individualist, consumerist, and heterosexist attitudes and behaviors of the dominant white culture, which they adopt as survival strategies, in effect undermining black group identity and cohesion. If a note of optimism is to be sounded amid the many challenges to inter- and intraracial community the novel presents, it is in the potential undoing of black cultural nationalism that cultural theorist Paul Gilroy sees as a crucial step in the making of an egalitarian, convivial postcolonial world. The novel contests the homogenizing impulses of essentialist identity politics by portraying the heterodox, sometimes paradoxical, affinities that emerge between characters and communities.</div>

scholarly journals “‘It ain’t have no sort of family life for us here’”: Community and its Discontents in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Andrew Greenwood
Keyword(s):  
Social Services ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Black Immigrants ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Paul Gilroy ◽  
The Many ◽  
Cultural Theorist

<div>Sam Seldon's The Lonely Londoners depicts an emergent collectivity of black immigrants who lead literally and metaphorically subterranean lives in 1950s Britain. Against the backdrop of a city undergoing an ambivalent transition from colonial metropole to postmodern cosmopolis, Seldon's "boys" remain largely inscrutable to and estranged from not only white Londoners but also one another. Critics have associate a depoliticized preoccupation with the everyday and eschewal of critical consciousness in Seldon’s work with widely critiqued features of Anglophone modernism. The present analysis suggests several reasons why political collectivity remains elusive to Seldon's black male immigrant characters. Specifically, they face discriminatory access to the labor market and social services, loci of possible solidarity with working-class white Londoners where formal political resistance might be coordinated. These systemic pressures combined with an atmospheric racism cause many of the boys to internalize the racialist, individualist, consumerist, and heterosexist attitudes and behaviors of the dominant white culture, which they adopt as survival strategies, in effect undermining black group identity and cohesion. If a note of optimism is to be sounded amid the many challenges to inter- and intraracial community the novel presents, it is in the potential undoing of black cultural nationalism that cultural theorist Paul Gilroy sees as a crucial step in the making of an egalitarian, convivial postcolonial world. The novel contests the homogenizing impulses of essentialist identity politics by portraying the heterodox, sometimes paradoxical, affinities that emerge between characters and communities.</div>

Enacting Identities in the EU–Russia Borderland

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 400-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Smith ◽  
Stuart Burch
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Everyday Performance ◽  
The City ◽  
Theoretical Analyses ◽  
The Eu

Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s theoretical analyses of “nationness” and nationalism in post-communist Europe, this article examines the dynamics of social identity within the nationally contested setting of the Estonian–Russian borderland. Since 1991, the city of Narva (96% Russophone by population) has customarily been defined (both politically and academically) in binary national terms as a “Russian enclave” within a unitary and “nationalizing” Estonian state. An ethnographic approach to the case, however, gives a rather different perspective, pointing to hybridity rather than nationality as the defining characteristic of identity politics within the city. In what follows, we bring to bear the results of extensive fieldwork carried out in Narva during 2006–2008. We first examine how different identity categories (local, national, meso-regional, and supranational) are being officially inscribed within Narva’s sites of memory. Thereafter, we focus on how these discursive-material articulations of place are implicated within the everyday performance of identity amongst the city’s population. Using the novel methodology of photo elicitation, we examine how residents of Narva appropriate but also subvert the identity categories that elites and outsiders (including ourselves as researchers) would seek to impose on them from above. This study (we argue) is significant for its methodological novelty, as well as in terms of giving a more nuanced understanding of Narva’s situation at a time of continued ethnopolitical contestation within Estonia as a whole.

At Nature's Edge

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Impacts ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
East African ◽  
African Countries ◽  
The Road ◽  
European Experience ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Many

In an epoch when environmental issues make the headlines, this is a work that goes beyond the everyday. Ecologies as diverse as the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean coast, the Negev desert and the former military bases of Vietnam, or the Namib desert and the east African savannah all have in common a long-time human presence and the many ways people have modified nature. With research in six Asian and African countries, the authors come together to ask how and why human impacts on nature have grown in scale and pace from a long pre-history. The chapters in this volume illumine specific patterns and responses across time, going beyond an overt centring of the European experience. The tapestry of life and the human reshaping of environments evoke both concern and hope, making it vital to understand when, why, and how we came to this particular turn in the road. Eschewing easy labels and questioning eurocentrism in today’s climate vocabulary, this is a volume that will stimulate rethinking among scholars and citizens alike.

scholarly journals The ground-level ozone concentration is inversely correlated with the number of COVID-19 cases in Warsaw, Poland

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oskar Wiśniewski ◽  
Wiesław Kozak ◽  
Maciej Wiśniewski
Keyword(s):  
Wind Speed ◽  
Ozone Concentration ◽  
Inverse Correlation ◽  
Ground Level ◽  
Viral Agent ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Weather Factors ◽  
Ground Level Ozone ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

AbstractCOVID-19, which is a consequence of infection with the novel viral agent SARS-CoV-2, first identified in China (Hubei Province), has been declared a pandemic by the WHO. As of September 10, 2020, over 70,000 cases and over 2000 deaths have been recorded in Poland. Of the many factors contributing to the level of transmission of the virus, the weather appears to be significant. In this work, we analyze the impact of weather factors such as temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and ground-level ozone concentration on the number of COVID-19 cases in Warsaw, Poland. The obtained results show an inverse correlation between ground-level ozone concentration and the daily number of COVID-19 cases.

LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION OF THE EVERYDAY LIFE CATEGORY IN THE NOVEL WRITTEN BY G. SH. YAKHINA “ZULEIKHA OPENS HER EYES” AND IN ITS TRANSLATION INTO CHINESE

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-95
Author(s):  
Iana E. ANDREEVA
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Chinese Translation ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Linguistic Methods ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Language Pair

This article examines the linguistic means of representing the category of everyday life in the novel by G. Sh. Yakhina “Zuleikha opens her eyes” and in its translation into Chinese. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the anthropology of everyday life, a broad line of research into everyday life. Comparative study of linguistic units, which reveal the essence of everyday human existence, makes it possible to identify lacunar units that are difficult to translate fiction in the context of the Russian-Chinese language pair. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the involvement in the analysis of linguistic methods of conveying the category of everyday life in the aspect of translating a Russian literary text into Chinese. The work used the methods of comparative, component, contextual analysis, the method of linguoculturological commenting. As a result of the study, the lexical-semantic, lexical-stylistic and grammatical lacunar units were identified, which demonstrate linguocultural barriers in the process of translating a text into Chinese. A comparative analysis of the texts was carried out in order to comprehend the lexical and grammatical transformations performed in the process of translation. As a result, the main ways of compensating for the lacunae of everyday life in Russian-Chinese translation were identified: transcription, tracing, descriptive translation, lexical-semantic replacement. In addition, it was found that the study of various options for depicting everyday life in a literary text not only makes it possible to identify lacunar units of everyday life, but also reveals the artistic and philosophical intention of the work.

‘as though nothing were happening—or rather, not happening’: Excess and Vacuity in The Little Girls

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-113
Author(s):  
Margaret Mills Harper
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
The Many

There's a hole in the middle of Bowen's late novel The Little Girls, literally as well as figuratively: a cavity in the ground dug by three childhood friends for the purpose of burying a secret box. Indeed, the novel is full of holes, from caves and missing treasures to absences, losses, and griefs. At the same time, the book displays a fullness or even extravagant overstuffed quality. Its style, pace, plot, and themes are supersatured, with breathless dialogue, restless activity, and suggestive detail. The Little Girls is very funny even as it never wanders far from catastrophe. The novelistic decision to throw the two modes of comedy and tragedy together is one of the many risks Bowen takes in this novel. She does so as part of a larger meditation on the structures that support art as it frames and thus falsifies, but also acknowledges human lives and history. The Little Girls is about emptiness and loss, but it also suggests that the superfluities and distractions with which people fill their lives have value. This essay pursues several strands of intertextual allusions to find something of what the novel both flamboyantly offers and steadfastly refuses.

Dewey, Adorno, and the Purpose of Art

2017 ◽  
pp. 470-488
Author(s):  
Espen Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Many

The chapter focuses on Dewey’s claim that art should be viewed as a model of full, unrestricted human experience. Art, in this sense, is supposed to serve as a cognitive correction of certain key trends in modernity, including the transformation of experience in line with social and scientific requirements of abstraction, quantification, and instrumentality. Drawing on Adorno’s competing account, it is argued that Dewey’s position does not sufficiently grant art autonomy and that modern art, in particular, does not offer a direct alternative to the forms of experiential deformation identified by Dewey. Unlike Dewey, Adorno views art as radically separated from the everyday and able to offer insight only in an indirect, self-negating manner. Despite the many similarities between the two thinkers, the chapter argues that Dewey did not respond with sufficient care to aesthetic modernism, which by and large resisted the organicism he attributes to art in general.

scholarly journals Women in Transnational Migrant Activism: Supporting Social Justice Claims of Homeland Political Organizations

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liza Mügge
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Transnational Politics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Kurdish Women ◽  
Narrow Definition ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Migrant Activism

This article studies the conceptions of social justice of women active in transnational migrant politics over a period of roughly 20 years in the Netherlands. The novel focus on migrant women reveals that transnational politics is almost completely male-dominated and -directed. Two of the exceptions found in this article include a leftist and a Kurdish women organization supporting the communist cause in the 1980s and the Kurdish struggle in the 1990s in Turkey, respectively. In both organizations gender equality was subordinated to broader ideologies of political parties in their homeland. Leftist activists in the cold war era supported a narrow definition of the "politics of redistribution," while and Kurdish activists, combined classical features of the latter with those of traditional identity politics.

scholarly journals Low Genetic Connectivity of Strongly Inbred Ruppia brevipedunculata in Aquaculture Dominated Lagoons (Viet Nam)

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludwig Triest ◽  
Jasper Dierick ◽  
Thi Thuy Hang Phan ◽  
Quang Doc Luong ◽  
Nguyen Quang Huy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Water Surface ◽  
Ecological Factors ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Genetic Connectivity ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Variability ◽  
Gene Pools ◽  
Aquaculture Ponds ◽  
Genetic Differentiation Of Populations ◽  
The Many ◽  
Private Alleles

Lagoonal environments exhibit high levels of instability depending on hydrological, climatic and ecological factors, thereby influencing the distribution and structure of submerged plant communities. Conditions typically fluctuate widely due to the interaction of freshwater from rivers with saltwater from the sea, as well as from aquaculture activities that together influence submerged hydrophyte community spatial and temporal variability depending on plant survival strategies. Ruppia species feature either underwater pollination mediated by an air bubble or by the release of pollen floating at the water surface, the former promoting self-pollination. Tropical Asian Ruppia brevipedunculata Yu and den Hartog was assumed to pollinate below the water surface and identified as a separate lineage among selfed Ruppia taxa. We used nine nuclear microsatellites to estimate inbreeding levels and connectivity of R. brevipedunculata within a large SE Asian lagoon complex. Ruppia brevipedunculata meadows were strongly inbred as could be derived from the many monomorphic or totally fixed loci for unique alleles in different parts of the lagoon, which appears consistent with selfing behavior. Those from aquaculture ponds were highly inbred (FIS = 0.620), though less than open lagoon sites that showed nearly total inbreeding (FIS = 0.942). Ruppia brevipedunculata from two major lagoon parts were highly differentiated with spatially structured gene pools and a strong barrier between parts of the lagoon over a 30 km distance. Migration-n analysis indicated unidirectional though limited gene flow and following potential hydrological connectivity. Overall, private alleles under homozygote conditions explained a stronger genetic differentiation of populations situated inside aquaculture ponds than of open lagoon populations. Kinship values were only relevant up to 5 km distance in the open lagoon. Within a confined area of aquaculture ponds featuring dense vegetation in stagnant water, there would be opportunity for mixed pollination, thereby explaining the higher diversity of unique multilocus genotypes of aquaculture pond habitats. Low connectivity prevents gene pools to homogenize however promoted sites with private alleles across the lagoon. Complex hydrodynamic systems and human-made habitats enclosed by physical structures impose barriers for propagule dispersal though may create refugia and contribute to conserving regional genetic diversity.

scholarly journals Beyond Secularism: Orhan Pamuk's Snow, and the Contestation of 'Turkish Identity' in the Borderland

Konturen ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ülker Gökberk
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Nobel Prize Winner ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Social Stratum ◽  
Islamic Faith ◽  
Turkish Society

This paper explores the multifaceted discourse on Islam in present-day Turkish society, as reflected upon in Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow. The revival of Islam in Turkish politics and its manifestation as a lifestyle that increasingly permeates urban environments, thus challenging the secular establishment, has occasioned a crisis of ‘Turkish identity’. At the core of this vehemently contested issue stands women’s veiling, represented by its more moderate version of the headscarf. The headscarf has not only become a cultural marker of the new Islamist trend, it has also altered the meanings previously attached to socio-cultural signifiers. Thus, the old binaries of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ ‘backwardness’ and ‘progress,’ applied to Islamic versus Western modes of living and employed primarily by the secularist elites and by theorists of modernization, prove insufficient to explain the novel phenomenon of Islamist identity politics. New directions in social and cultural theory on Turkey have launched a critique of modernization theory and its vocabulary based on binary oppositions. I argue that Pamuk participates, albeit from the angle of poetic imagination, in such a critique. In Snow the author explores the complexities pertaining to the cultural symbolism circulating in Turkey. The ambiguity surrounding the headscarf as a new cultural marker constitutes a major theme in the novel. I demonstrate that Snow employs multiple perspectives pertaining to the meaning of cultural symbols, thus complicating any easy assessment of the rise of Islam in Turkey. By withholding from the reader a clear guide to unequivocal judgment of right and wrong, the author transcends the parameters of Turkish modernist ideology. Pamuk situates his story in Kars, a border city in North-Eastern Turkey. This location at the geographical and cultural margins of Turkey emerges in the novel as a complex site of contested ideological, political, and metaphysical positions pertaining to the question of Turkish identity. It represents a space where Islamic faith in its esoteric and exoteric forms is carried out over against state-imposed laicism. I argue that it is the other-worldliness of the locale that instigates such a reflection. The protagonist Ka, a Turkish poet who has briefly returned to his hometown, Istanbul, after twelve years of exile in Germany, embarks on a journey to Kars. A member of the secular Istanbul bourgeoisie, Ka seems to be afflicted by an ailment common to his social stratum, a vacuum of spiritual values. Even though Ka travels to Kars with a journalistic mission, he soon becomes entrapped in this alien world of Sheiks, head-scarved girls, and former communists turned political Islamists. The novel oscillates between the Ka’s perspective as a detached observer and his personal quest to find transcendence. By employing multiple perspectives, Pamuk complicates any easy assessment of the rise of Islam in today’s Turkish society. I complement this reading of Snow with a brief excursus to Pamuk’s recent memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, permeated by the author’s critique of the modernist ideology of the Republican era. This critique sheds light on Pamuk’s opaque discourse on faith in Snow. These two books by the Nobel-prize winner have been his most disputed ones among the Turkish secular intelligentsia. I conclude with a reference to these critical commentaries.

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