’The Trump Era is Here, and I Finally Feel at Home‘ – Sayed Kashua in Illinois

In early July 2014, the Israeli-Palestinian author Sayed Kashua declared in his popular Hebrew column in the Ha’aretz newspaper that he is done with Jerusalem, that he has moved to the United States for good and is never coming back. Despite this emotional statement and his decision to give up on Israel, Kashua continued to write his popular weekly column for over three years mostly from his new place of residence in the midwestern city of Champaign, in Illinois, a location vastly different from the Jerusalem he left behind. Using theories of migration and transnational writing to examine Kashua’s non-fictional Hebrew and English works during this period I argue that there is tension between the character Kashua assumes for his Israeli readership and the one he assumes when writing for an American audience. These fictional personae relate differently to the move to the US and the possibility of returning to Israel. Moreover, Kashuua’s Israeli persona continues to write from a minority position whereas his American counterpart, despite concerted efforts, cannot avoid identifying with white privilege. The article then traces the dissolution of Kashua’s dual personae to his decision in November 2017 to stop writing the weekly column.

Hedging Effectiveness of Commodity Futures Contracts to Minimize Price Risk: Empirical Evidence from the Italian Field Crop Sector

Over the last years, farmers have been increasingly exposed to income risk due to the volatility of the commodities prices. Among others, hedging in futures markets (i.e., financial markets) represents an available strategy for producers to cope with income risks at farm level. To better understand the advantages of such promising tools, this paper aims at analyzing the hedging effectiveness for soybean, corn and milling wheat producers in Italy. Following the literature, three different methodologies (i.e., naïve, OLS, GARCH) are applied for the estimation of the hedge portfolio, then compared to an unhedged portfolio for assessing the income risk reduction. Findings confirm the hedging effectiveness of futures contracts for all the considered commodities, showing also that this effect increases with longer hedge horizons, and also showing better performances for the European exchange market (i.e., Euronext), compared to the North American counterpart.

Waiting for Asian Canada

While the scholarly narrative of Asian Canadian identity is often one of belatedness with regard to its American counterpart, the poetry of Fred Wah reveals a dynamic, diasporic context for Asian Canadian expression. While Wah’s poetry has often been read through its American avant-garde influences, his work from the mid-1980s onward focuses increasingly on biography under the influence of Asian Canadian activism. Wah’s book Waiting For Saskatchewan stitches together the techniques of American avant-garde poetry with Japanese poetic forms and the theme of diasporic return to China, creating a pan-ethnic, transnational aesthetic that is in conversation with Asian American models but distinct from its Canadian context.

Individual Pride and Collective Pride: Differences Between Chinese and American Corpora

This study investigated cross-cultural differences in individual pride and collective pride between Chinese and Americans using data from text corpora. We found higher absolute frequencies of pride items in the American corpus than in the Chinese corpus. Cross-cultural differences were found for relative frequencies of different types of pride, and some of them depended on the genre of the text corpora. For both blogs and news genres, Americans showed higher frequencies of individual pride items and lower frequencies of relational pride items than did their Chinese counterparts. Cross-cultural differences in national pride, however, depended on the genre: Chinese news genre included more national pride items than its American counterpart, but the opposite was true for the blog genre. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to the existing literature (based on surveys and laboratory-based experiments) on cultural differences in individual pride and collective pride.

Han and/as Ressentiment: Lessons from Minjung Theology

Following calls in recent critical debates in English-language Korean studies to reevaluate the cultural concept of han (often translated as “resentment”), this article argues for its reconsideration from the vantage point of minjung theology, a theological perspective that emerged in South Korea in the 1970s, which has been dubbed the Korean version of “liberation theology”. Like its Latin American counterpart, minjung theology understood itself in explicitly political terms, seeking to reinvigorate debates around the question of theodicy—the problem of suffering vis-à-vis the existence of a divine being or order. Studying some of the ways in which minjung theologians connected the concept of han to matters of suffering, this article argues, offers an opening towards a redirection from han’s dominant understanding within academic discourse and public culture as a special and unique racial essence of Korean people. Moreover, by putting minjung theology in conversation with contemporary political theory, in particular the works of Wendy Brown and Lauren Berlant, this article hopes to bring minjung theology to the attention of critical theory.

Creative Writing Crosses the Atlantic: An Attempt at Creating a Minor French Literature

This chapter analyzes literary advice culture from a transnational-comparative perspective. It sheds light on the reception of the American poetics of creative writing in contemporary France by examining the specific case of Outils du roman: Avec Malt Olbren sur les pistes et exercices du creative writing à l’américaine (2016, Tools of the Novel. Exploring American Creative Writing with Malt Olbren) by the experimental prose-writer François Bon. This text represents a broader dynamic in which French authors of literary advice resort to a repertoire of American writing techniques in an attempt to revive French literature. To conceptualize this process of transfer, I use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature.” This notion conveys how literary advice in France must constantly position itself vis-à-vis its American counterpart, but also how it appropriates and transforms this same body of ideas and techniques. More generally, this chapter makes a case for an increased consideration of supranational transfers in the domain of literary advice when studying processes of local literary change.

The Gallic Singularity

The popular narrative that the French relationship between the sexes is more emotionally rewarding than its American counterpart has entered into scholarly discourse over the past decades. Promoted by several well-known French feminist scholars, the narrative locates the particularity of the French relationship in its paradoxical structure: women are both equal and not equal to men. Sexual difference lies in the particular, which is subordinate to the universal value of equality. The narrative was most recently revived in the anti-#MeToo manifesto published in Le Monde in January 2018. This article surveys the narrative’s history, beginning with French feudal law and tracing it through some of its later iterations to highlight how it has long offered French women a way of performing femininity while exercising power. The emotional investment in this narrative explains why it continues to be accepted among at least some French intellectuals, whereas it is generally rejected by American feminists.

A Sociological Survey of Japanese International Relations Journals and University Education: Still a Discipline ‘In Between’?

The Japanese discipline of international relations has been understood as a product of interaction with its Western other, formed and developed much like Japanese contested identity. But although much attention has been paid to how the discipline emerged and evolved, very little has been written about how the discipline looks now. To remedy that, we apply a sociology of knowledge perspective to find out whether the Japanese discipline of IR does still possess distinct qualities or whether there has been growing influence from its Euro-American counterpart. We proceed in two steps: (a) We analyze 175 articles from the Japanese language IR journals Kokusai seiji, Kokusai mondai, Kokusai anzen hoshō, Heiwa kenkyū, Ajia kenkyū, Revaiasan and Nenpō seijigaku, and dissect them according to topics, focus, author background and theories/methods used; (b) We conduct four case studies of IR education at Japanese universities to demonstrate how the discipline is taught, with a focus on lecturer background, experience and syllabus composition. Our findings suggest that although there remains a preoccupation with diplomatic history, loose methodology and either realist or atheoretical studies, there is a clear trend of convergence toward Euro-American standards, especially in university education.

The Portrayal of Pakistani Diaspora Students in Shamsies Fiction

Going to the advanced countries for higher education has been in vogue for long. There is a considerable rise in the number of international students in USA universities. This paper explores how Shamsie portrays interaction among international students. It is delimited to the analysis of Shamsies two novels: Salt and Saffron, and Kartoghraphy applying textual analysis as a research method. The insight gained through this research about friendship among international students is in keeping with the findings of the psychological research about three predictable patterns of friendship: friendship with the students of ones own country, friendship with other foreign students and friendship with students of the host country. In Kartoghraphy all three patterns of friendship are found while in Salt and Saffron only a strong bond of friendship between a Pakistani international student and her American counterpart is portrayed. Shamsie presents easy assimilation of Pakistani diaspora students.

Critical Legal Orientalism: Rethinking the Comparative Discourse on Chinese Law

Critical legal Orientalism is a tale of two empires, the United States and China. In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States established a special U.S. court for China, thus incorporating China as the largest district of their jurisdiction. This extraterritorial court operated for about a century and advanced an American legal imperialism in China that continues today. It is an empire founded on the notion of China as a place where law actually does not exist because neither its subjects nor its state lives up to the rule of law. Such Western assumptions about China and its legal tradition are called “legal Orientalism.” Comparative legal scholarship has introduced this concept and erected a critique of U.S. law and foreign policy around it. In the Chinese reception, this Western self-criticism has taken a political turn. Here, legal Orientalism feeds into an imperial narrative, which is no less ambitious than its American counterpart for it allows discrediting concerns about Chinese legal practice as an Orientalist misreading. Rule of law criticism is thereby silenced, and this extends the space for what has been recently called China’s “New Era.” The concept of legal Orientalism, as we know it today, is not ready to address such a political turn of legal Orientalism. It has no understanding of its own critical position beyond a Western self-criticism. Therefore, this Article develops the outlines of a critical legal Orientalism. It argues that legal Orientalism will be a critical project of comparative scholarship only if it reflects on its own position; and this includes reflecting on its political, ethical, and normative implications. A critical legal Orientalism thus marks a discursive position that neither serves to reinvent self-righteous empires nor to silence ideas of justice in their names.