Eating Out

Author(s):  
Anna Cottrell

In Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), Eleanor Pargiter observes a lower-middle-class couple in a restaurant, enjoying their time off after work. Variations of this scene appear in many novels of the 1930s; the restaurants and teashops where London’s lower middle class spent their lunch breaks and evening outings became the settings in which their behaviour, their cultural preferences and even their dreams could be scrutinised. Eleanor concludes after watching the self-conscious couple that their performance is borrowed from the movies and illustrated magazines. This performance consisted of glamour and ‘nonchalance’ – modes incompatible with their working lives, but perfectly fitting in establishments that offered ordinary people atmospheres far removed from their mundane routines. Although Woolf does not identify it as such, the scene probably takes place in a Lyons Corner House – one of the four grand central London teashops that provided their patrons not only with affordable food, but also with a visual spectacle that could rival the glitter of the West End and the glamour of cinemas.

Author(s):  
Rachana Johri

Globalizing cities in India offer the promise of escape from caste- and gender-based identities, but those who make the journey often encounter difficulties, including the fragmentation of their home experience, and even violence once they get to the city. Lower-middle-class girls are seen as a challenge to ideals of chaste Indian womanhood, while Dalit boys and girls are challenging dominant ideals in Brahmanical India by questioning the nation state and its inherited ideals, including the caste system. This paper draws on cinematic and lived narratives to argue that cities in India are characterized by highly contested spaces, bodily practices, and technologies of the self, where the body of the city, and bodies in the city, are the lived realities of these tense negotiations.


ESOTERIK ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Mukhamad Agus Zuhurul Fuqohak

<p class="06IsiAbstrak">Syattariyyah Tariqa has its own uniqueness in dhikr. Namely, the process of change from the pronunciation of lâ ilâha illallâh to Allah, lahû, and the last is hû hû hû. There are so many motives and reasons why the word was chosen. This library-based research field, qualitative and ta'shîliyyah will see semantic language lessons in it. The result of this research is that the remembrance of hû hû hû can be called without pure intentions by the Sufi figure of the Syattariyyah Sufi Order. That is only done by people who have reached a high level in remembrance. Not only ordinary people and the lower middle class. In addition, the dhikr has an extraordinary spirit of glorification of God Almighty. Because dhamîr sya’nu (word hû) is presented to only refer to God Almighty. This research contributes to Sufi mystical treasures that study about how the foundations of Sufis and adherents of the tarekat in carrying out their teachings.</p>


Author(s):  
Lise Jaillant

This chapter focuses on the introductions that T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf wrote for the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (both published in 1928). Oxford University Press, whose London branch bought the World’s Classics from Grant Richards in 1905, was known for its Bibles and scholarly works, not for literary experimentation. So why would such a staid publisher include an introduction by Eliot, a writer with “a sustained interest in rotting orifices”? Why would a series associated with an old English university value the opinion of Woolf, who repeatedly criticised the patriarchal structure of the academic system? This chapter argues that, by the late 1920s, Woolf and Eliot had become well-known names recognisable by the lower middle class, the self-educated and other readers of the World’s Classics. They lent their growing reputation to boost sales of reprints, and in turn, they benefited from their association with a large-scale publishing enterprise (including access to a wide American readership). The World’s Classics contributed to transforming the image of these modernist writers from infamous avant-gardists to members of the artistic establishment.


Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia

This chapter analyzes how call center workers, who are mostly middle- and working-class youth, create narratives that are described as expressing modern forms of “individualized Indianness.” The chapter demonstrates how call center workers produce narratives of individualized Indianness by engaging in practices of mimicry, accent training, and consumption; by going to public spaces such as bars and pubs; and by having romantic relationships that are largely hidden from their families. The narratives examined in this chapter are created out of an asymmetrical context of power as young Indians work as “subjects” of a global economy who primarily serve “First World” customers. The interviews with Indian youth reflect how tradition and modernity, mimicry and authenticity, collude with each other to dialogically create new middle-class subjectivities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110205
Author(s):  
Shruti Ragavan

Balconies, windows and terraces have come to be identified as spaces with newfound meaning over the past year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns. There was not only a marked increase in the use of these spaces, but more importantly a difference in the very nature of this use since March 2020. It is keeping this latter point in mind, that I make an attempt to understand the spatial mobilities afforded by the balcony in the area of ethnographic research. The street overlooking my balcony, situated amidst an urban village in the city of Delhi – one of my field sites, is composed of middle and lower-middle class residents, dairy farms and farmers, bovines and other nonhumans. In this note, through ethnographic observations, I reflect upon the balcony as constituting that liminal space between ‘field’ and ‘home’, as well as, as a spatial framing device which conditions and affects our observations and interactions. This is explored by examining two elements – the gendered nature of the space, and the notion of ‘distance and proximity’, through personal narratives of engaging-with the field, and subjects-objects of study in the city.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 480
Author(s):  
Frank G. Bosman

The story collection known in the West as The Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights, is famous, among other things, for its erotic playfulness. This eroticism was (and is) one of the key reasons for its continuous popularity after Antoine Galland’s French translation in 1704. The Arabian Nights includes, besides traditional, heterosexual acts, play, and desires, examples of homoerotic playfulness—even though we must tread lightly when using such Western concepts with an oriental text body such as this one. The homoerotic playfulness of The Arabian Nights is the subject of this article. By making use of a text-immanent analysis of two of the Nights’ stories—of Qamar and Budûr and of Alî Shâr and Zumurrud—the author of this article focuses on the reversal of common gender roles, acts of cross-dressing, and, of course, homoerotic play. He will argue that these stories provide a narrative safe environment in which the reader is encouraged to “experiment” with non-normative sexual and gender orientations, leaving the dominant status quo effectively and ultimately unchallenged, thus preventing the (self-proclaimed) defenders of that status quo from feeling threatened enough to actively counter-act the experiment.


1969 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yen-P'ing Hao

In Chinese history, few reformers have been merchants and, prior to Cheng Kuan-ying, none of them was a merchant working for foreigners. In the late Ch'ing, the rise of the merchant class was remarkable and the reformers came from varying social backgrounds. Yet Cheng Kuan-ying (1842–ca. 1923) was the only noted merchant-reformer in this period. Due to his association with the foreign merchants, he was probably the first reformer in modern China who mastered a Western language. This fact made his reform proposals unique in many ways, although his understanding of the West as a whole was limited. The significance of Cheng Kuan-ying as a reformer lies in the fact that he implicitly challenged the programs of the self-strengthening movement by pointing out the necessity of institutional change.


2018 ◽  

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.


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