Writing the Self: A Study on Buchi Emecheta’s Autobiographical Novel Second Class Citizen

Life-writing, according to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, is a general term for the writing of diverse kinds that takes life as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or an explicit self-reference to the writer. As autobiographies, as well as autobiographical novels, can be considered as self-referential modes of writing, a notion of the terms in which the subject preconceives himself/herself becomes pervasive for understanding autobiographies as well as autobiographical novels. Susan Stanford Friedman, in her essay “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice” (1988) opens a critique of a seminal essay by Georges Gusdorf where he states that the cultural precondition for autobiography is a pervasive concept of individualism, a “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life” (Qtd in Friedman 72). Friedman argues that the individualistic concept of the autobiographical self that pervades Gusdorf’s work raises serious problems for critics who recognise that the “self, self-creation, and self-consciousness are profoundly different for women, minorities, and many non-western peoples” (Friedman 73). While taking into account the differences in socialization in the construction of male and female gender identity, Friedman refers to Regina Blackburn in her “In Search of the Black Female Self” and says that the “black women autobiographers use the genre to redefine ‘the black female self in black terms from a black perspective’” (Qtd in Freidman 78). Moreover, in the postcolonial context, C.L. Innes in The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2007) considers the use of the self-referential mode as a tool by postcolonial writers to represent his/her culture and also to capture and address contemporary concerns. Against this backdrop, this paper seeks to explore the use of the self-referential mode by the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta in her autobiographical novel Second-Class Citizen (1974)

An Alternative to Individualism: Relational Concept of Human in Confucian Role Ethics

The article proposes to see Confucian role ethics as a philosophical project that puts forward metaethical and metaphilosophical arguments regarding the nature of ethics and the concept of human beings, instead of concentrating on its interpretational work in explicating the nature of early Confucian ethics. Thus, a more fitting context for evaluating the core claims of role ethics is suggested, one that is comprised of different positions, coming from a wide range of philosophical and cultural backgrounds, as well as different disciplines, all of which criticize individualism or formulate a non-individualistic concept of person. Role ethics concept of person, as a totality of one’s lived roles and relations, is discussed by concentrating on the specificity of two key notions in this position, that is, “relation” and “role”. The article ends with a suggestion that the deeper and fuller investigation and exposition of normativity, as stemming from the specific and concrete role-relationships, is the most needed and promising direction of further development of role ethics.

A retrospective of socio-cultural integrity of individualism as propaedeutics of modern political economy analysis

Subject. The article addresses socio-cultural qualitative integrity of individualistic concept as a metaphysical basis of political economy analysis in the context of actualization of non-economic and non-cognitive factors of economic development. Objectives. The aim is to develop a formation sequence of the qualitative integrity of ontological paradigm of individualism as propaedeutics of the innovative form of modern political and economic development of countries and areas worldwide. Methods. The study draws on interdisciplinary, logical and epistemological, and qualitative analysis of individualism as a general basis for the formation and development of the public sector of the modern economy; and the content analysis of modern relevant domestic and foreign sources. Results. The result of the research is the imperative of understanding individualism as a socio-cultural phenomenon, which is a unity of value forms that determine the internal logic of a systematic approach to the modern political and economic analysis of economic development. The paper emphasizes the critical importance of permanent primacy of constitutional principles and freedoms of the individual, as well as the secondary nature of the post-constitutional institutions of coordination, even if they are inclusive and imply the stability of functioning and the unconditional protection of property rights. Conclusions. The scientific and practical significance of paper is in the possibility to use directly the elements of qualitative integrity of the ontological paradigm of Hayek's individualism for the development of an innovative model of political economy analysis of any economic system, taking into account its socio-cultural and civilizational features.

The Community Concept

For almost as long as ecology has been a discipline, it has struggled to define what constitutes an ecological community. A sharp dichotomy emerged early on, contrasting the view that communities were tightly integrated entities consisting of interdependent species (the community-unit concept) vs. the view that species co-occur largely according to the individualistic response of each species to spatially variable environmental conditions (the individualistic concept). To a large degree, the latter view has dominated ecological thought since the mid-20th century, based to a considerable extent on empirical patterns of community composition along environmental gradients. However, it has been repeatedly pointed out that neither view (in its extreme form) can capture the reality of processes and patterns in real communities, in which species often show both some degree of interdependence and gradual change in composition based on environmental conditions. Despite the debate regarding the concept of an ecological community, the discipline of community ecology has thrived and remained a key pillar of the broader field of ecology, with intense debates over the importance of competition in driving community structure and the relative importance of processes occurring at different spatial and temporal scales, among others. Finally, while few contemporary theoretical ecologists treat communities as belonging to discrete types, the community-unit concept lives on in applied ecology, where the classification of communities (often described as “vegetation” or “ecosystem”) is commonplace in order to facilitate conservation management, prioritization, and policy.