Consuming (Post)Colonial Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faye Caronan
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Jessica Hagedorn ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Esmeralda Santiago ◽  
Travel Guide ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines how travel guides and ethnic novels, despite being mainstream cultural representations, reproduce hegemonic narratives of U.S. exceptionalism by enabling consumers to experience the “authentic” postcolonial other. It analyzes three different sets of texts that all serve to deliver the colonized other to a mainstream U.S. public that is specific to its particular historical context: Our Islands and Their People (1899), the popular travel guide Lonely Planet: Philippines and Lonely Planet: Puerto Rico, and the novels Dogeaters (by Jessica Hagedorn) and América's Dream (by Esmeralda Santiago). The chapter shows how these novels and travelogues reproduce narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and affirm U.S. global power independently, without overt ties to the U.S. government. It argues that the ethnic novel delivers the postcolonial other for consumption by a mainstream U.S. audience while the travel guide recommends how best to consume the postcolonial nation.

scholarly journals Policing the Imperial Periphery: The Philippine-American War and the Origins of U.S. Global Surveillance

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26
Author(s):  
Alfred William McCoy
Keyword(s):  
Data Management ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Information Infrastructure ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Digital Surveillance ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Current Controversy ◽  
The U.S

Using a methodology that inserts the current controversy over NSA surveillance into its historical context, this essay traces the origins of U.S. internal security back to America’s emergence as a global power circa 1898. In the succeeding century, Washington’s information infrastructure advanced through three technological regimes: first, the manual during the Philippine War (1898–1907); next, the computerized in the Vietnam War (1963–75); and, recently, the robotic in Afghanistan and Iraq (2001–14). While these military missions have skirted defeat if not disaster, the information infrastructure, as if driven by some in-built engineering, has advanced to higher levels of data management and coercive capacity. With costs for conventional military occupations now becoming prohibitive, the U.S. will likely deploy, circa 2020, its evolving robotic regime—with a triple-canopy aerospace shield, advanced cyberwarfare, and digital surveillance—to envelop the earth in an electronic grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or atomizing a single insurgent in field or favela.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faye Caronan
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Cultural Representation ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Filipino American ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The U.S

This book explores how Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural critiques are delegitimized and obscured by U.S. imperialism and global power. Drawing on Raymond Williams's dual definitions of culture as both the experience of everyday life within a society and the cultural productions that circulate within society, the book analyzes the ways that Filipinos and Puerto Ricans have been represented to affirm narratives of U.S. exceptionalism in the early twentieth century and today. It considers how recent Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural productions across multiple genres critique these justifications, and how the U.S. cultural market contains these critiques to reaffirm revised narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. This introduction provides an overview of the institutionalized narrative of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the politics and economics of Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural representation, and hegemonic narratives of racial stereotypes in the United States.

Allied Encounters

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisa Escolar
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Traumatic Events ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The U.S

Allied Encounters: The Gendered Redemption of World War II Italy is the first-ever monograph to analyze cultural representations of Allied-occupied Italy, one of the war’s most unstable spaces. While the U.S. military viewed itself as a redemptive force, competing narratives emerged in the Italian imaginary. Both national paradigms, however, are deeply entangled with the gendering of redemption long operative in Anglo-American and Italian discourse, emerging from a Dantean topos that depicts Italy as a whore in need of redemption. Tracing the formation of these gendered paradigms and pointing to their intersection with sexualized and racialized identities, this book examines literary, cinematic, and military representations of the soldier-civilian encounter, by Anglo-Americans and Italians, set in two major occupied cities, Naples and Rome. Informed by the historical context as well as their respective representational traditions, these texts—produced during and in the immediate aftermath—become more than mirrors of the intercultural encounter or generic allegories about U.S.–Italian relations. Instead, they are sites in which to explore other repressed traumas—including the Holocaust, the American Civil War, and European colonialism, as well as individual traumatic events like the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine and the mass civilian rape near Rome by colonial soldiers— that inform how the occupation unfolded and is remembered. In addition to challenging canonical interpretations of emblematic texts, this book introduces several little-known diaries, novels, and guidebooks.

Rates of Cesarean Delivery Among Puerto Rican Women - Puerto Rico and the U.S. Mainland, 1992-2002

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Varela-Flores ◽  
◽  
H. Vázquez-Rivera ◽  
F. Menacker ◽  
Y. Ahmed ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Cesarean Delivery ◽  
Puerto Rican Women ◽  
The U.S

Geology and hydrogeology of the Caribbean islands aquifer system of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Renken ◽  
W. C. Ward ◽  
I.P. Gill ◽  
Fernando Gómez-Gómez ◽  
Jesús Rodríguez-Martínez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Virgin Islands ◽  
Aquifer System ◽  
Caribbean Islands ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The U.S

Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-133
Author(s):  
Hamid Mavani
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Legal Provisions ◽  
Novel Reading ◽  
Analytic Skills ◽  
Do So

The polyvalent Qur’anic text lends itself to multiple interpretations, dependingupon one’s presuppositions and premises. In fact, Q. 3:7 distinguishesbetween muḥkam (explicit, categorical) and mutashābih (metaphorical, allegorical,symbolic) verses. As such, this device provides a way for reinterpretingverses that outwardly appear to be problematic – be it in the area ofgender equality, minority rights, religious freedom, or war. However, manyof the verses dealing with legal provisions in such areas as devotional matters,marriage, divorce, child custody, inheritance and bequest, and specific punishmentsappear to be unequivocal, categorical, and explicit. As such, scholarshave devised certain hermeneutical strategies to situate and contextualizethese verses in a particular socio-historical context, as well as to emphasizethat they were in conversation with the society to which the Qur’an was revealedand thereby underlining the “performative” (p.15) nature of the relationshipbetween the Qur’an and the society.No verse is more problematic, in the sense that it offends contemporarysensibilities and is quite difficult to reconcile with an egalitarian worldviewwhen dealing with gender issues, than Q. 4:34, which allows the husband todiscipline his wife if he deems her guilty of nushūz (e.g., disobedience, intransigence,sexual lewdness, aloofness, dislike or hatred of himself). AyeshaChaudhry undertakes a study of this challenging verse by engaging the corpusof literature in Arabic from the classical period to the seventeenth century; shealso includes Urdu and English sources for the post-colonial period.She starts off by relating her personal journey from a state of discomfortand puzzlement when she first came across this verse in middle school to adefensive posture in trying to convince herself by invoking the Prophet’scompassion toward his wives and in cherishing the idea that the Qur’an gavemore rights to women than either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.She began a more rigorous and nuanced study of this verse after equippingherself with the necessary academic tools and analytic skills during her universitystudies. Frustrated with the shallow responses and the scholars’ circumspectionas regards any creative and novel reading of the verse for fearof losing their status in the community, she decided to do so herself with thehope of discovering views that would promote an egalitarian reading ...

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