scholarly journals Ama Ata Aidoo’s Diagnose and Representation of the Dilemma of the African American Diaspora in her play Dilemma of A Ghost

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 136
Author(s):  
Ammar Shamil Kadhim Al-Khafaji

The research investigates in details about the influence of cultural differences in Postcolonial Ghana as presented in Ama Ata Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost. The play centers on the cross cultural marriage of young couple; Ato Yawson, a Ghanaian who recently completed his studies in the United States and returns home, and Eulali, his African American bride. Ghanaian playwright Ama Ata Aidoo expresses the consciousness of the diaspora of Ato Yawson and his wife and the final effort of Yawson’s mother to find a compromise. The husband is caught between the challenging demands of his wife and his family, He feels torn and irresolute as the folkloric ghost in the children's song in the play. Aidoo has a strong historical and political awareness of Africa's colonial past and post-colonial present, and the problems facing an African woman in Africa and outside it. She is like a physician, diagnoses the symptoms of the troubled postcolonial age in Africa. In her use of Dilemma tale technique, she raises difficult questions without easy solution leaving her readers to contemplate about. She calls for an action to resolve the painful dilemma of African life in a world of change where the past and present, tradition and modernity suffer a fierce conflict. The aim of the research is to prove that according to the concept of compensation there is neither absolute gain nor absolute loss for with every loss there is again and with every gain there is a loss. Without the concept of compromise the dilemma of diaspora will lead to catastrophic results.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sznycer ◽  
Aaron Lukaszewski

Social emotions are hypothesized to be adaptations designed by selection to solve adaptiveproblems pertaining to social valuation—the disposition to attend to, associate with, and aid atarget individual based on her probable contributions to the fitness of the valuer. To steerbetween effectiveness and economy, social emotions need to activate in precise proportion to the local evaluations of the various acts and characteristics that dictate the social value of self and others. Supporting this hypothesis, experiments conducted in the United States and India indicate that five different social emotions all track a common set of valuations. The extent to which people value each of 25 positive characteristics in others predicts the intensities of: pride (if you had those characteristics), anger (if someone failed to acknowledge that you have thosecharacteristics), gratitude (if someone convinced others that you have those characteristics), guilt (if you harmed someone who has those characteristics), and sadness (if someone died who had those characteristics). The five emotions track local valuations (mean r = +.72) and even foreign valuations (mean r = +.70). In addition, cultural differences in emotion are patterned: They follow cultural differences in valuation. These findings suggest that multiple social emotions are governed (in part) by a common architecture of social valuation, that the valuation architecture operates with a substantial degree of universality in its content, and that a unified theoretical framework may explain cross-cultural invariances and cultural differences in emotion.


Autism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 1993-2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Gillespie-Lynch ◽  
Nidal Daou ◽  
Maria-Jose Sanchez-Ruiz ◽  
Steven K Kapp ◽  
Rita Obeid ◽  
...  

Although stigma negatively impacts autistic people globally, the degree of stigma varies across cultures. Prior research suggests that stigma may be higher in cultures with more collectivistic orientations. This study aimed to identify cultural values and other individual differences that contribute to cross-cultural differences in autism stigma (assessed with a social distance scale) between college students in Lebanon ( n = 556) and those in the United States ( n = 520). Replicating prior work, stigma was lower in women than men and in the United States relative to Lebanon. Heightened autism knowledge, quality of contact with autistic people, openness to experience, and reduced acceptance of inequality predicted lower stigma. Collectivism was not associated with heightened stigma. Findings highlight the need to address structural inequalities, combat harmful misconceptions, and foster positive contact to combat stigma.


2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOH CHULL SHIN

AbstractHow do contemporary publics understand happiness? What makes them experience it? Do conceptions and sources of their happiness vary across culturally different societies? This paper addresses these questions, utilizing the 2008 round of the AsiaBarometer surveys conducted in six countries scattered over four different continents. Analyses of these surveys, conducted in Japan, China, and India from the East; and the United States, Russia, and Australia from the West, reveal a number of interesting cross-cultural differences and similarities in the way the people of the East and West understand and experience happiness. Specifically, the former are much less multidimensional than the latter in their conceptions of happiness. Yet, they are alike in that their sense of relative achievement or deprivation is the most pervasive and powerful influence on happiness.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin R. Smith ◽  
Paul B. Perrin ◽  
Carmen M. Tyler ◽  
Sarah K. Lageman ◽  
Teresita Villaseñor

Author(s):  
Cai Wang ◽  
Myung Hwan Yun

The aim of this study is to compare the cross-cultural differences in product preference among users from different countries, taking Mi band 3 as a case study. With the development of global market, more and more products and services are sold across the globe. Users from different cultures have different behaviors, cognitive styles, and value systems. Therefore, product should be designed to meet the needs and preferences of users from different cultural groups. Compared to traditional research method such as survey questionnaire or interview that requires variety of foreigners as participants, text mining methods from online reviews save much more cost and time. We collected review data from the following three websites: Naver of South Korea, Jingdong of China, and Amazon of the United States. Text mining methods including opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and semantic network analysis were performed. Firstly, product aspects were extracted from reviews according to word frequency. This indicates how much users are paying attention to different aspects of the product. Fine-grained sentiment analysis was conducted to find out customer satisfaction with different product aspects. Then, the words most associated with each product aspect were listed. Cluster analysis was conducted and the topic of each cluster was summarized. Lastly, cross-cultural difference among three countries from the results was observed and discussed. Though there exist similar issues in product preferences among South Korea, China, and the United States, cross-cultural differences about Mi band 3 are shown in many product aspects. The outcome can suggest implications for making strategies in product internationalization and product localization for the global marketing of smart band.


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