Zambra, Codes of Honor, and Moorish Dress: Transculturation in Calderón’s Love after Death

This paper will offer a reading of Calderón’s Love after Death (Amar después de la muerte) that is removed from the binary opposition between Christianity versus Islam, which premise readings of the text as a pro-morisco play, and focuses on teasing out nuances of transculturation inherent in the text. At pivotal moments in the play, the morisco and the “pure” Christian are simultaneously presented in opposition and equality to one another in their shared adherence to a strict moral code of honor, which is arguably a Christian contribution to Spain’s hybrid culture. The cultural hybridization of clothing and costume points to the unreliability of visible signifiers that distinguished the morisco from the “pure” Spaniard and as a result, brings forth the difficulties Spain had in self-identification in opposition to the morisco. The only real signifier – the Arabic language – is linguistic, although it is clear many words from Arabic made their way into Spanish. Read in the context of a text produced in a Spain that was located at the border between purity and hybridity and between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, it can be argued that the representations of cultural practices in Calderón’s re-imagination of the rebellion of Alpujarras, bring forth evidence of a gradual process of transculturation between the moriscos and Christians and shed light on Spain’s almost desperate attempt to fight that process. Through this lens, the conflict between the moriscos and the Christians appears to have been conceived in the struggle against external forces that relegated Spain to the periphery of Europe. As a result of anti-Spanish prejudices of the leyenda negra that identified “Spanishness” with “Moorishness,” Spain was at once the colonial center in relation to the Americas and the New World, and simultaneously, Europe’s very own morisco “other.”

Stratification of bilingualism in Kyrgyzstan in the context of leading languages

The article is devoted to sociolinguistic monitoring of Bilingualism in the Regions of Kyrgyzstan. It is commonly known that Kyrgyzstan is a polyglossic state with many languages and many nationalities. Bilingualism is reflecting on language situation in regions, which makes the article extremely relevant. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the current situation in Kyrgyzstan, affected by the previous experiences of multilingualism, examples of the neighboring countries, and new nation-building expectations. The focus of our discussion is the changing role of Russian and its use as the language at the service of the growing Asian economies, denationalized and free from the Soviet historical-cultural background. The new hybrid culture and partly regionalized Russian language serve to unify Central Asian republics with Russia. The leading method for the study was the study of the Kyrgyz language in the context of the history the Kyrgyz people and the geographical position of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan. It was found out that ? number of diverse and complex conditions and factors lead to life-long bilingualism. There are no theories of language studying and training is proficient of explaining bilingual spoken behavior and the mechanisms leading to bilingual language growth.

THE SENSE OF BELONGING: HYBRID OR REINVENTION? A STUDY OF K. S. MANIAM’S IN A FAR COUNTRY

The issue of race, identity, and multiculturalism are focal points in modern novels. K. S. Maniam, as an Indian-Malaysian as such, explains the same question again in his writings. There is a longing or rather a forlorn look at India as the Motherland of some of the Indians in Malaysia in the setting of K. S. Maniam’s stories. The novel does not provide a complete recovery of the original country; it is instead giving a deep insight into finding out a connection to the place one settles in. In a Far Country is a typical example of the modern chaotic world through which Maniam sheds light on it. The research aims to analyse the redefinition of identity and determining race. It is also to explore the choices between a native and nonnative value in a foreign land. Under the analysis, Homi Bahbah’s theory of hybridity is chosen for the study of the novel. It is a significant and difficult step at the same time to reinvent one’s identity through a hybrid culture or rather to be called “reinvented” when the final solution fails and instead “reinvention” shapes a new identity.

Rap, Islam and Jihadi Cool: The attractions of the Western jihadi subculture

Recent scholarship has explored the potential of subcultural theory for understanding the convergence of Western street and jihadi subcultures. The role of jihadi rap in this radical hybrid culture, however, is yet uncharted. We argue that subcultural analysis allows an understanding of the aesthetic fascination of jihadism, sometimes referred to as jihadi cool, and that jihadi rap should be seen as an integrated part of this cultural amalgam. To better understand the role of hip-hop in the hybrid street-jihadi culture, this paper offers a historical analysis of the relationship between hip-hop and Islam and detailed insight into the more contemporary, and marginal, phenomena of jihadi rap. We track the continuities and discontinuities from the presence of Black Islam in early hip hop to recent convergences between hip hop and jihadism. Our analysis draws on Lévi-Strauss concepts of bricolage and floating signifiers. Subcultures and hip-hop music are seen as bricolages that draw on a multitude of cultural references with their own particular history. In these cultural bricolages, Islam often acts as a floating signifier, with different and often ambiguous meanings. We argue and demonstrate that Islam has a long history of being part of hip-hop rebellion and attraction and that this, channelled through jihadi rap, can contribute to jihadi cool and the contemporary pull of Western jihadi subcultures.

Positioning the Portrayal of White Protagonists in O.A Bushnell’s the Return of Lono and Ka’a’awa

This paper explores the role of literature in the post-truth age through reading on O.A Bushnell’s the Return of Lono and Ka’a’awa. A Hawai’ian novelist, Bushnell contextualizes the earliest interactions between the native Hawai’ian (Kanaka Maoli) and the white settlers which began with the arrival of Captain Cook’s expedition in 1778. Through his fictions, Bushnell underlines positive portrayal of the white characters to provide a counter-discourse to the generally accepted history of Hawai’ian colonialism. Through first person point of view, white characters become the central figure in both of Bushnell’s fictions. Through reading on O.A Bushnell’s narration, this paper aims to elaborate how the Hawai’ian natives also become a willing partner in western colonialism which highlights their colonial complicity. The concept of colonial complicity is employed to highlight the participation of the natives in promoting Western way of thinking. The analysis argues that although Bushnell contextualizes the complicity of the Hawai’ians in promoting Western discourse, resistance also occurs through creation of a hybrid culture. This paper concludes that in the post truth era, literature should always strive to uncover the truth based on subjective interpretation instead of abiding of a universal truth.

THE TRADITIONAL CULTURE OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE NORTH AS AN OBJECT OF DESIGN INTERPRETATION (REGARDING OB UGRIC PEOPLE)

The article presents the study of the design application, namely practical use of the elements of the traditional culture of Ob Ugric people, that include scenic compositions of rites and rituals as well as contextual attributes and decorations (ornaments). The research goal is to formulate a method of design interpretation that provides for ethically and efficiently embedment of elements of traditional culture into the semantic and image-bearing field of contemporary multicultural reality. This method is expected to further address the challenge of the deliberate development of a new/hybrid culture in the studied region (and, in a broad sense, in the entire territory of the Russian North). The novelty of the research is the detailed exploration of structural elements of the chosen culture in combination with the synchronous selection of tools, such as concepts of social and human sciences, as well as the means of a design that include formal, spatial, social, economic, ecological and technological representations. The basic methodology for analyzing research materials a systemic approach and structural elements of culture such as ornaments, rituals, and rituals were examined in a united figurative and semantic context. The combination of the methods of historical analysis and field ethnography allowed to identify the content and evolution of the studied phenomenon, as well as to consider individual cultural patterns and actions in real place and time. The proposed method of interpretation includes two following logical steps of identification: (1) the non-changeable content of the cultural core, which provides an inherent connection with the environment where the given culture takes place, and (2) the outer layer (material shell) that is available for transformation/modernization. As a result, the proposed method is presented through, first, the theoretical principles of a proper design interpretation based on the existing examples of cultural borrowings (with the case of traditional ornaments); and second, an educational experiment of designing a new Northern culture through borrowing and interpreting the traditional festivity “The Crow’s Day,” with a potential implementation within the local tourism industry. The final part describes the broad research relevance of the findings, along with the limitations and directions for further research.

The dagoba and the gopuram: A semiotic contrastive study of the Sinhalese Buddhist and Tamil Hindu cultures

Having shown previously how a culture type can be given a unitary description in terms of a semiotic “lens” constrained by one of the Peircean Categories (“Shamanic” culture, by Firstness), we apply this methodology to a more “fine-grained” level of analysis, by comparing the Tamil and Sinhalese cultures under the assumption that one of them (Sinhalese) is in fact a “hybrid” culture-sign. Having shown in previous work that the greater South Asian microculture may be characterized as a Firstness of Thirdness (13), in this paper we provide evidence from a variety of semiotic contexts, including language, art, and religion, that the novel or “intrusive” sign in Sinhalese culture is Firstness of Secondness (12), resulting in a hybrid culture sign that may be described as 12 × 13.