shifting identities
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Author(s):  
Eileen Rositzka

Loosely based on a 1944 novel by German writer Anna Seghers and set in present-day France, Christian Petzold’s Transit is a story of fateful migration, in which conflicting agencies and shifting identities are translated into an aesthetic principle. Its fluctuating interrelations between images, texts, and temporalities transform the film into an ultimate “non-place,” which, except for a few hints at fascism and a refugee crisis, provides no explanation or overview of its political implications. Alongside the characters, spectators are thrown into a world defined by fragile image spaces and zones of exclusion, always haunted by fragments of the past and glimpses of an uncertain future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Mizzi ◽  
Clea Schmidt ◽  
Gustavo Moura

This paper analyzes findings from research with 23 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer international educators and their experiences working in non-Western countries. This study documents the participants’ struggles, challenges, and triumphs of teaching overseas. In-depth interviews, as the data collection method, focus on changes made to thrive in the new country context and barriers to job success. The data reveals four key themes: (1) shifting identities in the new location; (2) belonging as a spectral concept; (3) work ethic as personal security; and (4) queer initiatives and student engagement. The authors introduce the notion of “belonging-scape” to suggest that while LGBTQ international educators faced a series of hetero/cisnormative borders, their sense of belonging to the workplace and to the community was in constant flux. Recommendations for educational administrators to ameliorate challenges unique to LGBTQ international teachers conclude the paper.


Author(s):  
Muqarram Khorakiwala

Cultural identity in contemporary diasporic communities is dynamic, multifaceted, and cyclical. In the age of reflexive modernity, it is imperative to think about new ways of conceptualizing the experience of individuals straddling multiple geographies. A model of identity for such individuals should not only explain the plurality of “being” but also the fluidity of “becoming.” In this article, the question of multiple and shifting identities of the four main characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s intergenerational novel, The Namesake, is explored using an interdisciplinary model from the field of business management based on Giddens’ theorization of reflexivity. The inward reflexive relationship between the “self” and the “other” through the discursive articulation of the ontological journey of the novel’s characters highlights the complex nature of diasporic identity construction.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Tina Kanagaratnam

This paper considers the parallels between the changes in Shanghai’s brick usage through history and the city’s shifting identities. Taking a new angle on studies of the Chinese wall, the author looks at the most basic element of the wall – the brick – in the context of Shanghai’s social and political history and postcolonial theory and proposes that it was the changes in the city’s identity, precipitated by both internal and external forces, that have ultimately driven the selection and subsequent interpretation of brick types during different periods of history. This paper also considers how brick usage is employed today to reinterpret history and define heritage.


2021 ◽  
pp. 178-211
Author(s):  
Mark R. Thatcher

This chapter explores the politics of identity in the Sicilian theater of the Peloponnesian War. Initially, most poleis in Sicily formed alliances based on ethnicity (either Dorian or Ionian), a form of kinship diplomacy that was typical in Greek politics. Camarina, however, allied with the Ionians despite being Dorian due to its unique polis identity, which had been shaped by hostility toward its mother city, Syracuse. Political decisions were thus conditioned by identities, and these, in turn, were often shaped by political rhetoric. An analysis of two speeches of the Syracusan politician Hermocrates, as rewritten by Thucydides, reveals a series of arguments, based on different identities in different contexts, that persuaded poleis to follow his recommendations. Identity thus played a central role in Greek politics, since the changing salience of different identities enabled poleis to make decisions on the basis of multiple identities over a short time.


Author(s):  
Dev Mayurakshi

: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) is an engagement in layers of shifting identities and their eventual unravelling. The novel is dominated by the character and voice of Iris Chase, an octogenarian who slowly and fumblingly presents to the reader the fragmented and complex personal history of her family. The novel becomes an exercise in historiography through Iris’s visitations to her and her sister Laura’s youth in order to explain their tenuous relationship which is achieved through three parallel sources: Iris’s own attempts at a memoir, journalistic documents and letters from the past, and excerpts from an infamous novel published forty years previously. My paper will explore the three narrative structures present in the novel, and attempt to understand the questions of authorship and writing, and their importance in building a historiographic narrative. It will try to examine the ways in which retrospective interventions into public history helps to counter and create identities which were hitherto repressed under social decorum. This paper will borrow from Linda Hutcheon’s writings of the postmodern metanarratives in order to compose a lucid understanding of what alternative historiography in literature can achieve, keeping at the centre Atwood’s novel.


Author(s):  
Martin Löschnigg

Winner of the Alfred Döblin Preis in 1999, the novel Die englischen Jahre by the Austrian novelist Norbert Gstrein deals with internment and exile in Britain dur- ing and after the Second World War. It centres on the (fictitious) character of Gabriel Hirschfelder, a writer and refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who is detained, with oth- er ‘enemy aliens,’ in a camp on the Isle of Man. There, Nazi sympathisers are interned together with Jewish and political refugees, and the central chapters in the novel depict the conditions and resulting conflicts in the internment camp. Hirschfelder dies in exile at Southend-on-Sea, having confessed shortly before his death that he killed a fellow inmate. This confession as well as reports of a transport of internees sunk off the coast of Scotland in 1940 incite a young Austrian woman to try to solve the mystery surrounding Hirschfelder and his allegedly lost autobiography The English Years. The paper discusses how Gstrein combines different genres like the historical novel/historiographic metafic- tion and the whodunit as well as using multiple narrative perspectives and refractions to pinpoint questions of shifting identities and allegiances, and of belonging and alienation in the wake of internment and exile.


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