Translator and Translated Twice Removed: Multilingual Selfhood in Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman

CounterText ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-262
Author(s):  
Natasha Lvovich
Keyword(s):  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Humanitarian Crisis ◽  
Fragmented Self

This article analyses the novel An Unnecessary Woman (2013) by the American-Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine from the perspective of multilingual selfhood, echoing Borges's vision of ‘writing as translation’ as it expands to considerations of literary translingualism. The narrator/protagonist of the novel, Aaliya Saleh, is a translator whose main occupation is translation into Arabic from the existing English and French translations: from literary West into East. The significance of the author's creative choice of what is referred to as a twice-removed translator is explored with the following questions: How, while navigating between two languages, cultures, and identities, is the multilingual individual experiencing the balancing act between the ‘translation’ and the ‘original’? To what extent are characters, generated by writers' translingual imagination, indeed creative (re)incarnations of the author's fragmented self? Is there such a thing as the fidelity to an original' for an immigrant (the author)? What can we learn about this translingual polyphony of voices when it comes from the area of political conflict and deepening economic/humanitarian crisis?

scholarly journals The Grammar of Politics, through the lens of Surveys and Web-based Social Network methods

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizaveta Karmannaya ◽  
Lee de-Wit
Keyword(s):  
Political Conflict ◽  
Social Networking Site ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Proper Nouns ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognitive Patterns ◽  
Network Methods ◽  
Social Conservatism

Political conflict and misunderstanding pose dangers to society. Psychological science has the potential to reduce this by providing unique insights into cognitive patterns associated with different political ideologies. A recent study (Cichocka et al., 2016) found that a seemingly unrelated behaviour – the use of Nouns when completing sentences describing individuals – correlated with political Social Conservatism. The following three-part study further investigated this association, its manifestations in spontaneous communication, and potential underlying mechanisms.Study 1 replicated the association between Noun use and Social Conservatism in a UK-based survey, using a broader set of political measures. It also found that the trait Essentialism, or the tendency to perceive individuals through stable underlying essences, may mediate the effect, alongside differences in education level. Study 2 extended the investigation to spontaneous communication, making use of network and linguistic data from the social networking site Twitter. This study also differentiated between Common Nouns and Proper Nouns, and found that Conservatives, on average, used more Proper Nouns per tweet than Liberals, while the effects for Common Nouns were inconsistent across various measures of Noun use. Study 3 aimed to validate the novel finding with Proper Nouns in a controlled questionnaire setting. The association between Conservatism and Proper Noun use was not confirmed, but the original effect with Common Nouns was replicated, and potentially mediated by sex and/or Essentialism. These findings suggest that the psychological characteristics differentiating Liberals from Conservatives, perhaps including the trait Essentialism, may affect their use of Nouns, although the direction of influence and potential demographic confounds need to be investigated experimentally. These results also suggest that in spontaneous, contextualised communication, such as that on Twitter, these differences may manifest themselves in the use of Proper rather than Common Nouns. Finally, the three studies demonstrate the benefits of combining short and simple, yet highly controlled questionnaires with more exploratory and larger-scale, web-based observations of spontaneous language use for the advancement of knowledge in Political Psychology and Psycholinguistics.

scholarly journals The ephemeral effects of fact-checks on COVID-19 misperceptions: Evidence from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan J. Nyhan ◽  
John Michael Carey ◽  
Andrew Markus Guess ◽  
Joseph B Phillips ◽  
Peter John Loewen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
The People ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Over Time

Widespread misperceptions about COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus threaten to exacerbate the severity of the pandemic. We conducted preregistered survey experiments in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada examining the effectiveness of fact-checks that seek to correct these false or unsupported misperceptions. Across three countries with differing levels of political conflict over the COVID-19 response, we demonstrate that fact-checks reduce targeted misperceptions, especially among the groups who are most vulnerable to these claims, and have minimal spillover effects on the accuracy of other beliefs about COVID-19. However, the positive effects of fact-checks on the accuracy of respondents' beliefs fail to persist over time in panel data even after repeated exposure. These results suggest that fact-checks can successfully change the beliefs of the people who would benefit from them most but that their effects are disappointingly ephemeral.

scholarly journals Representation of History in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-28
Author(s):  
Roshan K. Morve
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Phase Structure ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
War Novels

This study deals with the conflict of Nigerian Biafran War 6 July, 1960-15 January, 1967 as represented in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). The study attempts to address the following four questions: first, what are the causes-effects of Biafran/Civil war? Second, why Nigerians have been suffering during the wartime? Third, how does the representation of Nigerian history enable understanding of the post-colonial issues? And final, what is the role of conflict in Nigerian history? In order to understand this conflict, the study addresses the detailed analysis of war conflict, ethnic conflict, class conflict, military conflict and eco-political conflict. The post-colonial approach becomes one of the ways of engaging the theoretical understanding of the novel Half of a Yellow Sun. In sum up, the novel is located with the issues of marginality, history and conflict, which interrogates through post-colonial theoretical formations and the six-phase structure of war novels.

Totality

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-678
Author(s):  
Anna Kornbluh
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Fragmented Self ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
The Aesthetic

“Totality” offers itself for reading under the rubric of “defamiliarization” less on the basis of our overfamiliarity with it than on account of our already estranged relationship to it. Not only literary critics but also cultural theorists, art historians, and philosophers bid “totality” adieu in the 1990s through the influence of Jean-François Lyotard's forging of a causal link between thought under the sign of totality and action under the sign of totalitarianism, and his ensuing imperative, “Let us wage a war on totality.” The war is over and done with now that the eminently influential Bruno Latour has decried the intellectual and political fallout of “totality” on his way to explicitly resignifying Margaret Thatcher's dictum, “There is no such thing as society.” Yet in the process of conflating academic method and political action, the victors in this war have shrouded totality in confusion. It is the goal of this brief essay to address this confusion, to defamiliarize our defamiliarization. Victorianists in particular should take up the problematic anew, since totality has long been the lynchpin of modernist and postmodernist dismissals of Victorian literature as at once naïve and sinister, encyclopedic and imperialist, bloated, boring, and baggy. When Victorianists have tried to defend against these dismissals, they have generally emphasized that the fiction of the period is more fragmented, self-reflexive, and modernist than such charges admit—that, in short, the novel should not be associated with totality. But this cedes too much ground to bad definitions of totality. Another path to reclaim the aesthetic strengths and epistemic benefits of our period's literature would be to strike at the root, regrounding better definitions.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION: MUTUAL HELP IN AN ERA OF UNCERTAINTY

Africa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daivi Rodima-Taylor ◽  
Erik Bähre
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Voluntary Associations ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Institutions ◽  
Economic Networks ◽  
Mutual Help ◽  
Social Dynamic ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
State And Market

African communities are witnessing a perplexing proliferation of diverse arrangements of mutual security that draw upon old and new solidarities and inventively merge market logic with reciprocal forms of distribution and sharing. The dynamics of such voluntary arrangements and their broader social impacts emerge as increasingly important topics of study. The changing nature of global economies poses challenging questions about the novel relationships between state and market, and the potential of human agency to find alternatives to address growing inequalities. This collection focuses on local institutions of mutual security as alternative – yet also interdependent – forms of distribution that have become particularly relevant in the current era of global financialization and the changing dynamics between private and public social spheres. Various voluntary associations and informal economic networks, financial mutuals and savings/credit groups are becoming central in regulating access to resources and defining patterns of association in African communities. The articles in this themed part-issue explore these social security networks and organizations, concentrating on their ambiguous potential to empower the marginal as well as to contribute to social strife and political conflict. Ethnographic cases from diverse parts of Africa illustrate the impacts of the environments of uncertainty on the emergence of novel forms of association. The contributions suggest that contemporary mutual help arrangements should be seen as being central to the emergence of new social spaces and power configurations in such settings, revealing a broader social dynamic of globalization.

scholarly journals “A Toxic Trend?”: Generational Conflict and Connectivity in Twitter Discourse Under the #BoomerRemover Hashtag

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sipocz ◽  
Jessica D Freeman ◽  
Jessica Elton
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Intergenerational Conflict ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Generational Cohorts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Design And Methods

Abstract Background and Objectives This study examines the #BoomerRemover hashtag on Twitter to understand discourses of intergenerational conflict and unity that emerged during the novel coronavirus disease 2019 global pandemic. The research highlights conflict and connection surrounding generational cohorts via social media, particularly in a time of crisis. Research Design and Methods The study used an inductive-dominant qualitative content analysis to examine 536 tweets collected between March 9 and April 9, 2020 under #BoomerRemover. Results Data analysis revealed five forms of conflictive generational discourse: derogatory endorsement of the #BoomerRemover moniker, conflict regarding the nature and origins of the moniker, conflict surrounding the virus, political conflict, and generational jabs. Two forms of intergenerationally unifying discourse were identified: implicit and explicit pleas for connectivity. Discussion and Implications The analysis of discourse under #BoomerRemover revealed more nuanced expressions surrounding generational cohorts than widely reported in media outlets. Some users tweeted the hashtag in ways that reflected conflict, with #BoomerRemover acting as a vector through which stereotypes were perpetuated and magnified. However, a number of users tweeted the hashtag to call for intergenerational connectivity, highlighting the complexity of online discourse. These results yield implications for the study of online generational discourse, particularly in light of the unique circumstances surrounding the pandemic.

scholarly journals SOCIAL CONFLICTS ANALYSIS OF CHARACTER’S IN NOVEL BULANG CAHAYA BY RIDA K LIAMSI

Jurnal KATA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Zahra Wulandari ◽  
Yulia Sri Hartati ◽  
Titiek Fujita Yusandra
Keyword(s):  
Political Conflict ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Conflicts ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Personal Conflict ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Group Unity ◽  
Two Sides

<p><em>This article aims to describe social conflicts that include the forms, causes and impacts of social conflicts in the novel “Bulang Cahaya” by Rida K Liamsi. The problem of this novel lies in its content which tells a lot about social conflict. Method of the research is descriptive anaysis method. Based on the research findings and discussion it can be concluded that the social conflicts contained in the novel Bulang Cahaya by Rida K Liamsi include: (1) Personal conflict. This conflict impacts on the destruction of group unity where disputes that occur make the two sides contradict each other. (2) Political conflict. The political conflict that occurred between Raja Kecik and Tengku Sulaiman had an impact on the growing sense of group solidarity between the Bugis and Malays. (3) Conflict of social classes. conflicts between social classes in the novel Bulang Cahaya by Rida K Liamsi occur between the Bugis and the Malays.</em></p>

COVID-19 will exacerbate Sahel food crisis

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Burkina Faso ◽  
Warning System ◽  
Food Aid ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Humanitarian Crisis ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Environmental Threats ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Poor Nutrition

Subject Sahel, COVID-19 and hunger. Significance The countries of the Sahel -- Chad, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso -- already among the world’s poorest, are now battling the novel coronavirus epidemic at a moment when the region’s security problems and longstanding environmental threats have combined to threaten a humanitarian crisis across large parts of the region. Adverse security conditions, notably in Burkina Faso, have combined with agricultural fragilities to leave close to 17 million people needing food aid by June-August -- more than double the number usually affected in an average year. That figure does not consider the potential impact of COVID-19, which cannot yet be accurately predicted but may well be most severe. Impacts Stocks of the main cereal crops harvested in September-October will run low in June-September. Even the Sahel’s sophisticated hunger warning system will struggle to cope with COVID-19's negative effect on food production and aid. Poor nutrition and other infectious diseases may offset lower mortality from youthful populations.

The Use of the Past under Conditions of Disorientation and Instability: The Spanish–Catalan Political Conflict

2020 ◽  
pp. 278-306
Author(s):  
Gerard Rosich
Keyword(s):  
Meaningful Use ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Future Action ◽  
Recent Debate

The chapter discusses the field of tensions that shaped the new conditions under which a meaningful use of the past could be performed in the historiographical disputes pertaining to Spain. It develops a different perspective by highlighting novel contemporary elements that are too often neglected by historians themselves. It shows that the ‘professionalisation’ of history and the subsequent and recent debate on the Catalan question are intermediate situations that both try to avoid confronting the issue that a historian’s perspective is always influenced by the ongoing transformations. It argues that the ‘primacy’ given to a present that is already past in the debate on the Catalan question is both a consequence of a lack of orientation for future action and a way to disregard the normative and epistemic consequences imposed by the novel conditions under which history writing in the Spanish state presently takes place.

The novel steroidal glycoside from the dried bulb of Allium Macrostemon Bunge inhibits platelet activation

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (8) ◽  
pp. S33-S33
Author(s):  
Wenchao Ou ◽  
Haifeng Chen ◽  
Yun Zhong ◽  
Benrong Liu ◽  
Keji Chen
Keyword(s):  
Platelet Activation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Steroidal Glycoside ◽  
Allium Macrostemon
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