ECMI Minorites Blog. On Hyphenated Identities

In the spring of 2021, the Danish Borderland Association published the book Danskerne findes i mange modeller – portrætter af 15 unge med bindestregsidentitet by Marlene Fenger-Grøndahl. The book consists of fifteen interviews with young so-called cultural ambassadors of the Borderland Association, as well as essays on the history of the Danish-German borderland and the concept of a hyphenated identity that the young respondents refer to. In minority research, the concept of a hyphenated identity is both used and contested. However, the interviews underline that the concept can serve as an important backdrop for the empowerment of young people with minority identities. This ECMI Minorites Blog entry is written by Garbi Schmidt, professor of Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University.

F-1 Visa

Listen to the poem read by Saurabh Anad (author) with audio production by Ron Braxley: Check if it's OK with your visa and all? Writing Op-Eds on such things can be tricky.F-1 is like being behind the eight-ball. You’re not American, so why do their politics bother y’all?You’re here to study, yet locals may still go freaky.Check twice before you cause trouble with your visa and all. You don't even have a hyphenated identity. It's not your call,Don't ruin what you have. This path will not be easy.The F-1 visa keeps one behind the eight-ball. India and the U.S. are allies. Your decisions will declare you: mole.You’re a taxpayer but a stepchild in this country’s family,so check the consul’s small print on your visa and all. What if you get your dream job in this country after you graduate next Fall?You might afford a home, sponsor your parents, and live here freely,Don't take a chance at all. Being on F-1 is like being behind the eight-ball. I know how badly we both wanted to go to the #BLM protest at City Hall,But what if we get caught and need an attorney?Let’s check first. Would we be okay with the visa and all? Remember, we could loseour status, in an instant, since F-1s, at risk of being sunk, are forever behind the eight-ball.

Babble: a poetry collection exploring the cultural identity of modern Wales

Babble is a poetry collection that adapts the Welsh metrical tradition in English. The poetry exhibits characteristics of cynghanedd to explore varying perspectives on a modern Welsh cultural identity. Its main aim is to show how a hyphenated identity might be reconsidered to engage with ‒ and represent ‒ individuals struggling to establish a strong Welsh identification. The poetry collection has been influenced by Welsh history, its landscape and literature. It recreates a learning process that took me on a journey through Wales which strengthened my Welsh identity. The collection explores cultural identity through underrepresented female narratives from Welsh history, literature and mythology. My critical essay analyses why poets believed the craft of cynghanedd to be important to their identity and how they applied its techniques in their poetry. A creative methodology has been implemented in a poetry collection that imitates and responds to literature from the twelfth to the twenty-first century. It was critical to have a flexible creative process when writing cynghanedd in English. My poetry looks at modernist poetry and the craft of cynghanedd to develop a new style of poetry that could engage with a diversity of voices in modern Wales. The main aim of the collection was to engage readers with the craft of cynghanedd. This would prompt them to explore its connection to Wales. The collection considered ways that would provoke readers to question their ideas on identity in modern Wales.

Mapping the Estonian Literature of the Selfie-era

We live in the era of selfies as making photos of oneself and sharing these in social media has become extremely popular if not even a norm. The perceiving and experiencing subject is in the foreground. This is also valid in the field of literature, which has been democratized as anyone can make a book and anyone can write a book, as seen by the boom of biographies of all kinds. The My-series published by the Estonian publishing company Petrone Print illustrates these tendencies. The publishing company was founded in 2007 by Epp Petrone who had moved back to Estonia from the United States. Her My America was the first book in the series. In this series of books authors describe their lives and activities in one country or city. The series has a firm position in the Estonian literary field: the books are constantly in top ten lists and are in high demand in libraries. Taking the My-series as an example, the article maps tendencies in contemporary Estonian literature. The subject-centeredness is one of the characteristics of contemporary literature as the amount of books concentrating on one’s life experiences is quite noteworthy. The exact genre of this type of literature is ambiguous, which is another characteristic of contemporary literature. I would define the My-series books as ‘literary selfies’ as the person portrays him/herself setting the world in the background. Another issue discussed in connection with the series is migration. The demographic situation in Europe has changed and continues to change; various nationalities can be found in the world metropolises, and the shift from the monocultural and monolingual world to the multicultural and multilingual one is obvious. Therefore, more and more people have a ‘hyphenated identity’; consequently, one’s national identity may not be as clear as before. Over the last decade, a large number of Estonians have left their homeland and settled down in other countries, an aspect illustrated by the My-series.

Images of non-Arabs in West of the Jordan by Laila Halaby

The Jordanian-American novelist Laila Halaby is perceived as one of the most well-known contemporary Arab-American writers whose hyphenated identity raises questions regarding which side of the hyphen she belongs to. In this respect, one way to determine whether Halaby identifies herself as an Arab or an American is to examine how she perceives and explores Arab and American cultures and to investigate the different images she constructs about Arabs and Americans. In West of the Jordan (2003), throughout the tales of the four female cousins, this American writer of Arab descent explores the Arab communal values and conventions, as well as the Western beliefs and ways of life. Most importantly, Halaby depicts different images of Arabs and non-Arabs in the context of social, political, and economic conflicts and relationships. In this article, the focus will be mainly on the images of non-Arabs in West of the Jordan. My study, accordingly, draws on Edward Said’s Orientalism and its counterpart Occidentalism, which offer theories of communal and identity construction, as well as practices that lead to stereotyping discourses about the other. This article will consequently start with a definition of the term Orientalism and its counterpart Occidentalism, moving on to deal with the different images of non-Arabs in the second part. Indeed, this latter section investigates how Halaby, who belongs to the Western and Eastern worlds, produces knowledge of the Western society and culture, by offering interesting representations of the two worlds. The third part will shed some light on Halaby’s attitude toward the American world and toward the Arab-American relationships.

Timelessness and Precarity in Orientalist Temporality: Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s Aesthetics of Disorientation

The Hourglasses (2015), by French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, features five large hourglasses displayed artifact-like upon a table. As one would expect of an hourglass, these glass sculptures can be inverted to measure out time. This, though, is where convention ends, as these are filled with couscous, not sand. Unlike sand, couscous cannot measure time consistently and the inversion of any one of these five hourglasses results in a different measurement of time. In effect, they disorient any linear notion of temporality, raising the specter of Orientalism and its fantasy of a timeless East. Mehdi-Georges works in a diverse range of media including performance, sculpture, installation, and self-portraiture. Dealing with race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, identity, and representations of Islam and Catholicism, his work performs the instability in all these categories by critically complicating fantasies of “East” and “West” without relying on a mere binary reversal of meaning. Contextualizing his work within a larger history of Orientalism, my argument begins first with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” composed in 1817, followed by an analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalist paintings before leading to a concise discussion of contemporary Orientalism in art and art discourse. My analysis then circles back to the artist’s work to insist that Orientalism’s fantastical invocation of the East remains a disabling presence in the contemporary imaginary. Orientalism’s temporality, as glimpsed obliquely from Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s hyphenated identity, is likewise rendered unstable in his work. As seen in The Hourglasses, his work produces what I call “an aesthetic of disorientation,” predicated on the artist’s embodied cultural hyphenation, which renders the Orientalist fantasy of the East absurd through its own tropes of representation. By bringing queer theory and disability studies to bear on his work, I show how his practice engages with Orientalism’s temporality to open up new possibilities of perceiving the world.

The Origins of the Elephantine Jews

This chapter seeks out the origins of the Elephantine Jews. For more than a century, their origins have been a mystery. Owing to the decipherment of Papyrus Amherst 63, this chapter reveals new understandings about who the Elephantine Jews were and where they came from. It argues that most of the men and women we have come to think of as Jews were in fact Samarian Arameans. They had a hyphenated identity, somewhat similar to the double identity of Jewish Americans. By geographical origin, they were from Samaria. Having lived for about a century in the Aramaic-speaking environment of Palmyra, they had become Arameans. They had stayed loyal to their ancestral god Yaho but equated him with the storm god Bethel. In addition to Aramaic as their new language, they had also adopted several Aramean deities associated with Bethel: Anat-Bethel, Eshem-Bethel, and Herem-Bethel. Toward 600 BCE, they had migrated to Egypt, along with the Syrians and Babylonians they had lived with in Palmyra.

La Nueva Generation

Chapter 5 highlights the stories of Latino youth—immigrant and U.S.-born—growing up in North Carolina. It considers the multigenerational process of incorporation into U.S. society that consists of navigating a hyphenated identity; learning the English language, societal norms, laws, and institutions; and exploring a sense of identity and attachment to communities of settlement. Integration is a two-way process, and many factors in receiving communities can facilitate or impede immigrant and youth incorporation. The chapter explores factors that shape the economic outcomes of immigrants as they adapt to a new society, underscoring the importance of educational opportunities in the integration process. We meet several young Latinos whose experiences are emblematic of the newest generation of North Carolinians.

Cast Down, But Not Forsaken

This study seeks to reassess the notion that German-Canadians in Ontario were “silent victims” during the Second World War by exploring the wartime experience and memory of German-Canadian Lutheran congregations in Oxford and Waterloo Counties. Far from silent, Lutheran pastors initiated several strategies to ensure their congregants did not face discrimination and internment as they had during the First World War. These strategies encompassed several reforms, including eliminating German language church services and embracing English-Canadian symbols and forms of post-war commemoration. However, these reforms were often met with resistance and ambivalence by their congregations, thereby creating a conversation within the German-Canadian Lutheran community on how to reconcile its Germanic and Lutheran heritage with waging a patriotic war. While previous studies have primarily focused on identity loss, this study suggests that the debates that occurred within these Lutheran churches were representative of the community’s German-Canadian hyphenated identity.