Samaritans, Biblical Studies, and Ancient Judaism: Recent Trends

In this article, I survey recent trends in Samaritan studies, with a particular focus on biblical studies and the interactions of Samaritan Israelites with other religious traditions. While remaining entrenched in discussion of the origins of Samaritans, scholars have firmly embraced the idea of processual Samaritan identity, emerging over time and in a non-genealogical sense alongside and interwoven with Judean/Jewish self-definition. Extensive work clusters, in particular, at three nodes: the study of Hebrew-language scriptures, archaeological excavations, and the remodelling of identity-production in a constructivist form. I also sketch out the directions in which the field is moving, with growing and productive emphasis on Aramaic, Arabic, and late antiquity. Finally, I identify some of the quirks of Samaritan studies as it might be encountered, in particular a continued effort to salvage Samaritans for biblical studies, somewhat intermittent interdisciplinarity, and practices of engagement with Samaritan Israelites themselves.

Investigating Undergraduate Biology Students’ Science Identity Production

Identity production is a complex process in which a person determines who he or she is via internal dialogue and sociocultural participation. Understanding identity production is important in biology education, because students’ identities impact classroom experiences and their willingness to persist in the discipline. Thus, we suggest that educators foster spaces where students can engage in producing science identities that incorporate positive perceptions of who they are and what they have experienced. We used Holland’s theory of identity and Urrieta’s definitions of conceptual identity production (CIP) and procedural identity production (PIP) to explore the process of students’ science identity production. We interviewed 26 students from five sections of a general biology course for majors at one higher education institution. The interview protocol included items about students’ identities, influential experiences, perceptions of science, and perceptions of their classroom communities. From the interviews, we developed hierarchical coding schemes that focused on characterizing students’ CIP and PIP. Here, we describe how students’ socially constructed identities (race, gender, etc.) and their experiences may have impacted the production of their science identities. We found that authoring (i.e., making meaning of) experiences and recognition by others as a community member influenced students’ science identity production.

The Monograph Tradition and Chinese Scholarship: Beginning with the “Best Young Scholar’s Monograph Prize in the Social Sciences of Practice”

This article first explains why our “Best Young Scholar’s Monograph Prize in the Social Sciences of Practice” selection committee has chosen the three books International Law and Late Qing China: Texts, Events, and Politics, Rural Development in Contemporary China: Micro Case Examples and Macro Changes, and Urbanizing Children: Identity Production and Political Socialization of Peasant-Worker Sons and Daughters for the award, and then goes on to discuss how monograph production is faced with deeply contradictory forces in the scholarly environment of China today when compared with the American scholarly environment, to explain the purpose of the prize.

“Sacred to the Memory of Washington”

This chapter begins with the exceptionalism that pervades American discourse in the twenty-first century. Proceeding from the unsettled place produced by present-day extremes of nationalism, the author traces the roots of American exceptionalism to the post-Revolutionary period and to the efforts of the upper classes to form a national identity that would unify a fragmented country while maintaining their social position. Two ceramic items from an elite merchant household—a British transferprint plate commemorating the death of Washington and a Chinese porcelain saucer displaying an American-style eagle—are the subjects of this microscalar analysis of national identity production in New York City’s South Street Seaport after the war.

A clown, a political messiah or a punching bag? Rethinking the performative identity construction of celebrity through social media

In meeting the changing demands of authenticity and visibility in social media, performances of identity and connections are discussed to entail new sociotechnical labours and digital literacies. Research has looked into the construction and presentation of celebrity identities, in light of these developments, but has paid little attention on the celebrities’ experiences and perspectives, which is also due to the lack of willingness of industry insiders in this culturally sensitive business to be interviewed and genuinely talk about its problems. Twelve in-depth interviews with celebrities and entertainment industry practitioners were conducted between 2014 and 2015. Particularly, this article draws on the cases of two established celebrities in Hong Kong and China, and assesses how and why they were unable to actively construct and perform their preferred media identities, highlighting the blurring boundaries among traditional celebrities, micro-celebrities and ordinary people for their construction of online identities through social media, and also elucidating the opportunities and challenges posed by today’s evolving media environment. We argue that social media only superficially open up a site of counter-narratives for celebrities to resist the identities imposed on them by the mainstream media and online audiences. The interviewed celebrities’ contradictory experiences in their self-presentations in social media offer alternative angles to understanding the incoherent and unstable celebrity identity production processes, the blurring boundaries between celebrities and ordinary people through such processes as well as the celebrities’ capacity to reclaim control in asserting their ‘true’ selves.

The Neo-Passing Narrative

This introduction defines neo-passing by contextualizing the term not only in relation to classic passing narratives and scholarship on passing but also in relation to broad notions of performance, pretending, and identifying. The editors also connect their effort to delineate a genre of neo-passing narratives to recent scholarly efforts to define neo-slave narratives and neo-segregation narratives. Like those genres, neo-passing narratives mediate between historical and contemporary notions of racial and intersectional injustice. Using several recent case studies, the introduction explores the ways in which neo-passing narratives speak directly to the contradictions within contemporary debates about colorblindness and color-consciousness, or what one contributor calls the debate between postracialism and most-racialism. Finally, the introduction briefly describes each essay in the volume, emphasizing its engagement in a vigorous debate about the specific ways in which neo-passing narratives alternatively shore up, deconstruct, or complicate our understanding of performance and identity production after Jim Crow.

Neo-Passing

Bringing together fifteen essays by leading scholars, including a theoretical introduction by the editors and an insightful foreword and afterword by Gayle Wald and Michele Elam, respectively, this volume analyzes Godfrey and Young’s neologism neo-passing. Godfrey and Young define neo-passing as narratives and performative acts of passing that recall the complex racial politics that define classic tales of passing, such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912). The difference, however, between the former concept of passing and what Godfrey and Young call neo-passing is that neo-passing is performed and/or produced in various media after the end of legal segregation (circa 1954). Beginning with the Jim Crow–era assumption that passing will come to pass as soon as desegregation begins, this volume investigates how and why passing not only persists in the post–Jim Crow moment but has also proliferated. As with both neo-slave and neo-segregation narratives, performances of neo-passing speak to contemporary racial injustices and ideologies, asking readers to hold these in mind alongside the racial injustices and ideologies of the past. Typically, neo-passing also goes beyond the black/white binary that defined classic passing narratives to explore how identities are increasingly defined as intersectional—simultaneously involving class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Through explorations of newspaper articles, advertisements, journalism, fiction, graphic novels, film, comedy sketches, reality television, music, and social media, the essays in this volume engage in a vigorous debate about the specific ways in which neo-passing alternatively shores up, deconstructs, or complicates our understanding of performance and identity production after Jim Crow