Intra-cultural and Inter-cultural Contact Orientation of International Students in Japan: Uncertainty Management by Cultural Identification

The lack of exchange between international students and host nationals in Japan has long been a pressing issue, yet very little progress has been made to rectify this situation. This study examined this issue by focusing on how international students in Japan perceive intercultural contact with their host and home culture members during their sojourn. The study applied a qualitative approach based on grounded theory, collecting data through semi-structured interviews with 41 international students from China, the UK, and the USA, and tenets of Social Identity Theory and Anxiety/Uncertainty Management Theory were adopted. We analyzed the data on a framework of how international students manage uncertainty in the Japanese environment by identifying with the host and their own home cultures, which we distinguished as inter-cultural or intra-cultural contact orientation. International students demonstrated an intra-cultural rather than inter-cultural contact orientation due to the host nationals reacting to them as “foreigners.”

Récit colonial allemand sur la région du Cross-river au Cameroun : pluri-référentialité, collection des savoirs ethnologiques et relations interculturelles – le cas de Urwald-Dokumente: Vier Jahre unter den Crossflussnegern Kameruns d’Alfred Mansfeld

On the basis of the colonial narrative of Alfred Mansfeld, the present article shows how the narrator manages to convey his knowledge about Cameroon’s Cross-river region. German colonial literature played a very active part in the media campaign for the dissemination of information about the colonies. Therefore, the colonial space became an object of interest (as a source of knowledge) for colonial writers. The presented intercultural reading makes it possible to outline the different visions of cultural contact that existed between the colonizer and the natives.

Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan

Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship explores real-life instances and literary manifestations of cross-cultural friendship between Victorian female travellers and Meiji Japanese, examining its ethico-political significance against the backdrop of British ‘New Imperialism’. Shifting critical focus from the individualist model of subjectivity to affective relationality, Tomoe Kumojima conceptualizes the female travellers’ open subjectivity as hospitable friendship and argues that femininity proves to be an asset in their praxis of more equitable cross-cultural contact in non-colonial Japan. Political affordances of literature are the book’s overarching thread. Kumojima opens new archives of unpublished correspondence and typescripts and introduces contemporary Japanese literature hitherto unavailable in English, shedding a refreshing light on the works of Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes. The book traverses the themes of identity fluidity, literary afterlife, international female solidarity, literary diplomacy, cross-racial heterosexual intimacy, and cross-gender friendship. It traces the shifts in the representation of Japan in Victorian discourses prompted by Britain’s colonial management, Japan’s successful modernization, the Anglo-Japanese bilateral relationship, and global geopolitics, demonstrating how the women travellers complicated and challenged Oriental stereotypes and imperial binaries by creating counter-discourses through their literary activities. Kumojima also offers parallel narratives of three Meiji female pioneers in Britain and burgeoning transnational feminist alliances. The book addresses the absence of Japan in discussions of the British Empire in the field of literary studies and that of women and female agency in the male-dominated historiography of the Anglo-Japanese relationship.

Tun Mahathir’s administration of Malaysia’s relationship with Bangladesh: A preliminary appraisal

This study examines the pertinency and materiality of Malaysia’s affiliation with Bangladesh. It presents the picture of deep reciprocal relationships in trading and investment, workforce issues, and the societal, religious and cultural exchange between Malaysia and Bangladesh that deserve elevated research to get ideas of a further snapshot. The historiographic approach and literature-based qualitative method apply to this research and uses written primary and secondary sources to gather information. Several published texts and archival documents examine to achieve the objective. In terms of significance, the result of this study would craft a narrative of a new spear of the economic relationships, societal circumstance, and cultural contact that especially evident during Tun Mahathir administration when he served Malaysia as the fourth Prime Minister that would deserve supplementary study. Furthermore, it would serve to understand the characteristics of the subsequent engagements of Malaysia with Bangladesh.

The Mapping of Center and Periphery, and the Geography of Otherness

Some literatures, like Canadian literature, may be considered minor because Canada is not a major power. But in reality, Canadian literature and other literatures, large or small, are part of a cultural history that is not merely local or even national, but international. The territories of culture and literature in literal or metaphorical terms shift over time. Using a comparative method, this article examines texts—such as The Saga of Eric the Red and works by Columbus, Verrazzano, Jeannette C. Armstrong, Marie Annharte Baker and Carrie Best—to demonstrate the shifting boundaries of time and space and to explore the connections between cultures and literatures in Canada, Europe and the Atlantic and international worlds as part of a longstanding globalization. The article demonstrates that the hybridity resulting from cross-cultural contact and colonization typically blurs the distinction between center and periphery, revealing the historical fluidity of the political boundaries on which the concepts of national and world literatures are based. In doing so, it focuses on how North America, particularly Canada, and the historical process of its discovery, settlement, and colonization have connected this region to other parts of the world.

B(ordering) Utopia in Birobidzhan: Spatial Aspects of Jewish Colonization in Inner Asia

The borderline territory serves a double purpose, being simultaneously zones of cultural contact and cultural barriers–administrative and often civilizational. This ambivalence frequently affects borderline area inhabitants turning them into hostages of border management regimes and outside projections concerning their cultural and civilizational status, and the authenticity of forms of their culture representation. In the case of Birobidzhan, we are dealing with an absolutely modern project of creating ethnic territoriality without reference to the historical context and far from the places of traditional settlement of the Jewish population. The implementation of this project put the Jewish settlers at the center of a complex process of border management and securitization of the border areas. The factors of border and “remoteness” are largely underestimated in Birobidzhan studies. The article fills this niche, emphasizing the spatial aspects of the implementation of the “anti-Zionist utopia” and its complex relationship with previous models of territoriality in the region and local inhabitants.

Rewriting the Nation: German-Turkish Transformations of the Bildungsroman

Literatures arising in the context of migration and cultural contact are known to provoke the nationally confined canonisation of literature. While the view that so-called ‘migrant literature’ does belong to German literature and culture is widely established within recent scholarship, the literary means of claiming space in the national canon are still an under-researched topic. The purpose of the study is to analyse the literary means of claiming space in the national canon and thereby investigate the permeability of its boundaries. By rewriting a canonical genre of German literature, which is historically linked to the emergence of a sense of a national identity, the analysed German-Turkish texts are using the Bildungsroman as a frame of reference to articulate pluralistic national identities. They further inscribe historical representations that have been omitted from dominant historical discourse into the national cultural memory. While rewriting the genre, the texts participate in the actualisation of the Bildungsroman and thereby reposition its traditional boundaries. Finally, the novels express the need to renegotiate the concept of the nation as well as its demand for homogeneity.