Qipao: The Carrier of Chinese Cultural and Philosophical Symbols

The qipao has become the symbol of identity for Chinese women. It is a tight-fitting dress with a standing collar, an asymmetric left-over-right opening and two-side slits. Chinese knot buttons are also an essential part of the qipao. While the garment serves to express Chinese values and has philosophical connotations, its colour, fabric pattern and Chinese knot buttons express wishes for happiness, luck, fortune, longevity as well as a yearning for peaceful interpersonal relationships and harmony with nature. The qipao was developed not only from a traditional gown used by the Han (the majority Chinese ethnic group), but also integrated minority cultural elements and has recently added Western sartorial patterns. This has resulted in a national dress that is more harmonious with contemporary aesthetics, manifesting the adaptability, versatility and inclusiveness of Chinese culture.

A Tree Crosses the City: The Unconventional Artistry of Miguel-Ángel Zapata

No abstract.

The Luit in Bhupen Hazarika’s Songs: A Metaphor for Exploring Assam’s Linguistic and Ethnic Politics

The river Brahmaputra, also known as Luit, has always occupied an important place in the cultural mindscape of the people of Assam, a state in the northeast of India. A source of great pride because of its sheer size and the myths and lore associated with it, it has nevertheless brought untold misery to people over the years because of annual flooding. Authors and musicians of the land have found in the Luit an apt metaphor to tell stories of love, loss, belonging and pain. In the songs of Bhupen Hazarika (1926-2011), a renowned music composer from Assam, the Brahmaputra becomes a character through which the poet expresses both his anguish at the sufferings of the masses and his joy at the all- embracing nature of the valley. In songs like “Mahabahu Brahmaputra”, Hazarika tries to appeal to the people of Assam to maintain harmony and promote the land as one of plurality and hospitality. This song becomes significant when seen in the context of the Assam movement (a six-year long agitation to halt the illegal migration of people from neighbouring Bangladesh) and Hazarika’s own conflicted attitude towards it. This article is an attempt to examine how the Luit has been represented in a selection of Hazarika’s songs – the ways the river becomes a potent presence of deeply political and social overtones and a metaphor to underscore the turbulent history of Assam.

Et Tu, Atticus!: The Hero of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the Cold War

Against the background of the Cold War, this article rethinks the novel (1960) and film (1962) To Kill a Mockingbird, more specifically Atticus Finch’s characterization as the courageous, unblemished defender of an unjustly accused black man in the American South. Because of Atticus’s unrelenting efforts to exonerate Tom Robinson, he has been proclaimed the 20th century’s greatest American movie hero. At a closer look, however, it turns out that, while Atticus fights hard for Tom, he nevertheless, and as a matter of course, abandons the investigation into the stabbing death of Bob Ewell, a poor white man and Tom’s accuser. The New Yorker magazine noted this conflict in the movie. So, it begs the question: from what social attitudes does this broad-spectrum admiration for Atticus emerge? This article proposes an answer: it originates in identity-centrism, an attitude that underlies United States ideology during the Cold War era and results, specifically, in a total disregard for the poor. In other words, To Kill a Mockingbird is not a closed-ended novel of good versus evil, but an open-ended work that raises a troubling question about diversity.

Exile and the Disabled Body in Randa Jarrar’s “The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie”

This paper seeks to analyse the notion of exile as one of paradox, of being both within and without, as a disconnect between the mind and body. Edward Said has noted that exile is “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience”. Said’s suggestion of a mind/body split gives us room to consider the sense of self as already in-between, as the exiled ‘I’ attempts to find a home within a new land and a new body. Exile from one’s own homeland is also exile from one’s body in Arab-American author’s Randa Jarrar’s latest novel Him, Me, and Muhamad Ali (2016). The collection of stories moves away from reclamatory approaches to ethnic identity and examines the characters’ trajectories of selfhood through a gendered, racialized, and embodied image. Disability features as a site of tension, a site of interrogation of Zelwa’s (the protagonist) sense of self. It is a peculiar coming-of-age narrative in the sense that it is an anti-Bildungsroman, a probe into bodies that fail to be integrated, assimilated, or acclimated to American culture, while also failing to maintain their association with an Arab collective identity. Jarrar’s text underscores and redefines the “I” of the Arab immigrant exploring transgenerational trauma and reclaiming her identity through celebrating the body.

Caged Bodies, Raging Minds, Dissident Voices: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Taslima Nasreen

This paper aims to analyse the mental state of Taslima Nasreen and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, writers that are primarily celebrated for their rich casket of fictional narratives, through poems written at a juncture in their lives when they were dealing with the pain of separation and displacement from home and country. As a consequence of defying their respective governments through their revolutionary writings, such a separation is accompanied by the loss of a stable identity. Although they do not share the socio-political context that resulted in exile, the commonly felt strains and fissures of exile have guided their perspectives through particularly intimate landscapes, so that it is possible to describe their poems’ meaning in a wholly decontextualised manner. They both are, in a way, separated from conventional contexts: exile is an alienating experience, and home, no longer homelike, is perhaps an even more estranging place.

Contours of Resistance: The Postcolonial Female Subject and the Diaspora in the Punjabi Short Story

Diaspora literature and theory offer significant critiques of traditional ideas regarding nation-states, identities and dominant cultures. While it is true that the literature of the diaspora has been receiving increasing attention as of late, it is worth noting that works written in the diasporans’ native languages are generally not included in wider discussions about the more complex issues related to the diaspora. As an initial corrective for this deficiency, this article explores selected stories in Punjabi, paying special attention to issues relevant to the lives and experiences of women in diaspora. Diasporic conditions, as most of these stories seem to assert, can be painful for women, but even while negotiating within a diverse system of values, many of them eventually discover possibilities for independence and growth. Such personal improvements are attainable due to their newfound economic liberation, but hard-won economic independence comes with a price. The inclusivity implied by identitary hyphens (i.e. Chinese-American; Mexican-American, etc.), so celebrated in diaspora writings in English, are almost as a rule missing in the fictional accounts studied here. In these accounts, an essential feature of diasporic subjectivity is the double sense of “Otherness” strongly felt by people who, having extricated themselves from the cultural demands of their original group, are not unchallenged members of the dominant culture.

Deep Ecological Reading of Mahasweta Devi’s “The Book of The Hunter”: An Eco-Conscious Approach

Deep Ecology is one of the newly emerging areas in ecocritical studies. Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess has coined the word in order to promote ecological consciousness and encourage a feeling of shared identity between humans and the biosphere. Studies in Deep Ecology propose that the human being is just one more among the many species in nature, and not the supreme one; the belief that humanity is somehow exceptional is swiftly leading us towards the anthropogenic depletion of the environment. Mahasweta Devi, a well-respected author and social activist, shows great concern for the health of the ecosystem and its importance for the continuity of the human species, to the extent that a significant amount of her work can be used as apposite study material for eco-critical analysis. The novel considered here, The Book of The Hunter, incorporates salient features of the concept of Deep Ecology. Consequently, the present study reviews the novel with an ecological perspective, all the while discussing the author’s efforts to create eco-consciousness among the readers. The story follows the lives of two couples, the medieval poet Kabikankan Mukundaram Chakrabarti and his wife, and the youngsters Kalya and Phuli. While the novelist aims to capture the different socio-cultural conventions of XVI century rural society (in this Devi acknowledges her debt to Mukundaram’s 1544 epic poem “Abhayamangal”), she nonetheless offers a significant commentary on the deep-seated, beneficent attitude of the forest-dwelling Shabar community of Odisha and West Bengal towards ecological management. At the same time, the author illustrates the effects of the growing number of settlements encroaching upon the forest.

The Effectiveness of Coloring in Reducing Anxiety and Improving PWB in Adolescents

Anxiety is a normal reaction to stressful situations. Excessive anxiety can affect various aspects of life, especially in adolescents. Adolescents who have anxiety tend to experience sleep disorders, substance abuse, and suicide. Therefore, intervention is needed for adolescents who experience anxiety. One of the appropriate interventions for adolescents is art therapy with coloring techniques. Previous research has obtained evidence that coloring can reduce anxiety and improve psychological well-being (PWB). This study aims to determine the effectiveness of coloring activities in reducing anxiety and increasing PWB in adolescents. By using a quasi-experimental design pretest-posttest, total participants in this study were 26 students aged 15-18 years, were divided into two groups, such as mandala and other shapes coloring groups. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) is used to measure anxiety and the PWB questionnaire is used to measure psychological well-being. Using paired sample t-test showed that both coloring groups experienced a decrease in state anxiety before and after the intervention, but there was no significant increase in PWB. Further analysis found that mandala coloring activities were more effective in reducing anxiety than other forms of coloring activities, and PWB of the two groups did not increase. It can be concluded that coloring activities can reduce state anxiety but has not been able to increase PWB.

Netflix and Crime: Identification with the Characters of ‘La Casa de Papel’ Spanish Series

This study examines the Netflix Spanish series La Casa de Papel as a pragmatic example of a series that addresses questions of criminal justification. In this qualitative study, in-depth interviews were conducted with 17 Saudi participants. The findings suggest that the Saudi viewers justified the characters’ crimes influenced by fundamental attribution error. Viewers’ identification with the characters could be seen in their empathy with the robbery team and their desire for threatening characters to die. Viewers also stated that they did not want the criminals to be caught. In fact, viewers felt sad and emotional when the characters were shot or caught. Participants ranked the Professor, Tokyo, Berlin, and Nairobi as the most liked characters. Conversely, the least liked characters were Arturo Román and Sierra because they threatened the success of the robbery. Finally, participants accepted the banker joining the team, while they opposed detective Lisbon joining it.