DEVELOPING A CO-DESIGN PROCESS MODEL FOR THE DIGITAL PRESENTATION OF INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE: A CASE STUDY OF “WARM INHERITORS DIGITAL DIABOLO”

As digital technologies are becoming gradually integrated into museums and the preservation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), museums and the exhibitions of ICH are becoming more attractive and flexible. However, digital technologies may also bring some problems, such as cultural alienation. The participation of the inheritors and communities of ICH in the design of digital exhibitions could reduce such problems. The main contribution of this paper is a co-design process model for digital exhibitions of ICH. The study was conducted by the project, “Warm Inheritors Digital Diabolo”, which aimed to enhance the digital experience of diabolo by using virtual reality technology to implement interactive digital storytelling techniques. This project involved both designers and inheritors to realize the principle of respectful design. The results demonstrated the crucial role of inheritors and communities in the design process. This paper also offers some design recommendations.

Psychic geographies of queer multiculturalism: Reading Fanon, settler colonialism and race in queer space

Utilizing Fanon’s theories of psychic, social and embodied processes of racialization and racism, this article examines Toronto’s gay village as a site of queer settler multiculturalism and its impacts on Black and Indigenous lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirit and additional (LGBTQ2+) youth experiencing homelessness. I build on Fanon’s arguments of cultural alienation, the collective unconscious and white colonial anxiety and desire to analyze current iterations of queer settler colonialism and anti-Black racism within the village. Specifically, I argue that the village maintains a collective queer multicultural unconscious through social interactions and forms of representation that seek to tightly control Blackness and Indigeneity within queer space. By placing Fanon in dialogue with Black and Indigenous Studies scholarship, and interviews with Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2+ youth, I present how youth encounter and, to some extent, refuse the white and settler colonial queer multiculturalism in Toronto’s village.

Ambivalence of Cosmopolitanism: A Study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Writing

Although labeled as an immigrant writer, Ishiguro is not a typical one. His writing is not a repetition or successor of the diasporic literature. The various subjects and diversified locations of his works have been appropriately corresponded to his claim as “a kind of homeless writer”. He has always been locating himself in different cultures as well as engaged in a de-cultural writing, providing insights into the relationship between the subjective and the other, which shows his ambivalence dangling between different cultures. It is arguable that Ishiguro has several “deaths” before becoming a cosmopolitan. Nevertheless, the “killed” identity is inextirpable. The longing for subjectivity in his novels does not directly come from the cosmopolitan identity with whom he identified. Reading Ishiguro in the global context enables the detection of his compromise as a cosmopolitan writer constructed by a deliberate de-privileging and cultural alienation. Cosmopolitanism itself has been a paradoxical term in that its orientation points to the mutually inclusive “world” and “region”. Its implication is full of irreconcilable resistance and negotiation. The study is going to explore the ambivalence of cosmopolitanism in Ishiguro’s writing, to trace the progress of the making of the novelist as a cosmopolitan as well as embracing multiple cultures but denies clear boundaries, and to widen the scope of the discussion of globalization, localization, diasporic study, or postcolonial study.

To Mohassess, For the Wall

“To Mohassess, For the Wall” is an article written in 1964 by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of the most influential and charismatic Iranian intellectuals of the time. Three years before writing this article, Al-e Ahmad had published Weststruckness, discussing the Iranians’ cultural alienation caused by the dependence on the west. In “To Mohassess, For the Wall”, Al-e Ahmad shifts his analysis to Iranian painting, arguing that Iranian painters during the 1960s merely repeat Western cultural processes and strategies instead of constructing Iranian ones. The context for Al-e Ahmad's argument is the Pahlavi regime's radical program of rapid modernization, which in the area of the arts was systematically expanded. Critical, provocative or problematic, the article offers a crucial window into the adoption of Western-style modernism by Iranian painters during the 1960s and into how an “insider” intellectual such as Al-e Ahmad evaluated the modernization of Iranian art before the background of what he perceived as the critical neglect of Iranian traditions. The text is addressed to Bahman Mohassess, a painter whom Al-e Ahmad considered to be one of the few who had not been coopted by the cultural policies of the Shah's regime.

Introduction to Jalal AL-E Ahmad's “To Mohassess, For the Wall”

“To Mohassess, For the Wall” is an article written in 1964 by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of the most influential and charismatic Iranian intellectuals of the time. Three years before writing this article, Al-e Ahmad had published Weststruckness, discussing the Iranians’ cultural alienation caused by the dependence on the west. In “To Mohassess, For the Wall”, Al-e Ahmad shifts his analysis to Iranian painting, arguing that Iranian painters during the 1960s merely repeat Western cultural processes and strategies instead of constructing Iranian ones. The context for Al-e Ahmad's argument is the Pahlavi regime's radical program of rapid modernization, which in the area of the arts was systematically expanded. Critical, provocative or problematic, the article offers a crucial window into the adoption of Western-style modernism by Iranian painters during the 1960s and into how an “insider” intellectual such as Al-e Ahmad evaluated the modernization of Iranian art before the background of what he perceived as the critical neglect of Iranian traditions. The text is addressed to Bahman Mohassess, a painter whom Al-e Ahmad considered to be one of the few who had not been coopted by the cultural policies of the Shah's regime.

The individual and the social in Annie Ernaux's autobiographical writing

This article examines the ideological and aesthetic peculiarities of autobiographical writing in “La Place” by Annie Ernaux, a well-known contemporary French writer. We argue that Annie Ernaux 's “flat writing” is close to a sociological or ethnographic study and nearly devoid of any autobiographical subjectivity. Autobiographical writing is approached through the concept of symbolic violence, borrowed from the sociologist P. Bourdieu. Ernaux indeed replaces event history, a feature of autobiography, by the study of socio-historical causes of “class distancing” between father and daughter. The analysis of key concepts of the Ernaux's poetics makes it possible, on the one hand, to grasp the appearance of social and cultural alienation and, on the other hand, to achieve a social criticism of reality.

The Way of the Firang: Illustrating European Social Life and Customs in Mughal Miniatures (1580 CE -1628 CE)

During the sixteenth century, along with the rise of the Mughal Empire, the social landscape of India changed drastically with the advent of the European colonial powers. In 1580 CE, following the First Jesuit Mission to the Court of Emperor Akbar, a new cross-cultural dialogue was initiated that not only impacted the socio-economic and political fabric but also the artistic productions of the time. The growing presence of the European traders, ambassadors, soldiers, and missionaries in the Mughal world also lead to several curious narratives that were widely circulated. These tales also gave birth to cultural misconceptions as the Europeans on several occasions were seen as social evils. They were often collectively addressed as Firang/Farang or ‘Franks’ and were perceived as ‘strange and wonderful people’ or ‘ajaib-o-ghara’ib’. It was during the Mughal reign when for the first time in Indian visual culture, a conscious attempt was made to document the life and customs of the European people. This paper attempts to understand how the processes of cultural alienation and Occidentalism had influenced the representation of Europeans in Mughal miniatures. It also argues how Mughal artists innovate new iconographic schemes to represent and perpetuate a sense of the ‘other’. How artists used these identity markers to establish notions of morality as well as of Islamic cultural superiority. The select illustrations also attempt to elucidate how these representations of Europeans were culturally appropriated and contributed to the Mughal ‘fantasy excursions’.