Reflections of a Racial Queer

In this article, I reflect on my personal experiences of racial queerness. In an effort to speak my secrets, I explore my identity production as a Multiracial person by critically examining my positionality throughout various key stages in my life. I present Multiracial microaggressions –those accumulated moments that underscore my racial queerness and argue that these phenomena, while taxing, also confer agency. I propose a conceptual framework that incorporates both queer theory and borderlands theory as a potential framework from which to study how Multiracial individuals are positioned as racial queers. I argue that queerness, for the Multiracial individual, may denote both deviance (from the monoracial norm) and a unique individuality (stemming from one’s Multiracial background). By offering my testimonial as a racial queer and introducing the racial queer conceptual framework, I come a bit closer to naming my experience as a Multiracial individual and providing a space from which others can do the same.     

A critique of critical acculturation

This critique is divided into three sections. The first section is a review of my positions on three core issues regarding the nature of the human sciences (particularly cross-cultural and acculturation psychology) that have been raised throughout these articles. Knowledge of these positions is essential background to understanding my comments in the second section. In the second section are some comments on specific claims and assertions about my work that have been made in the articles. I believe that many of these assertions do not represent my views, nor my empirical research, on acculturation. Of necessity, I have had to select certain themes among all of these assertions. Although the special issue is a critique of acculturation theory and research in general, the majority of the comments are addressed to my work in the area. Hence, I have concentrated on criticisms directed at my own work, rather than attempting to address the field as a whole. However, my comments likely have more general import for the field of acculturation psychology as a whole. I invite readers to consider these very contrasting sets of views about how we are to understand individual human beings within the context of cultures, and of culture contact and change. A third section returns to some of the basic issues regarding the nature of the scientific enterprise. I advocate a dual approach, accepting both the natural sciences and cultural sciences ways of advancing our knowledge of human behaviour in context. I argue that dismissing the positivist traditions of the natural sciences, and replacing them with social constructionist concepts and methods is a regressive step in our search to improve our understanding of acculturation. Moreover, I have found little in these articles that advances our knowledge of acculturation, or our potential for making applications for the betterment of acculturating individuals and groups.     

Symbolic bordering: The self-representation of migrants and refugees in digital news

ABSTRACT

In this article, I combine theorizations of the selfie as an aesthetic and technological practice of digital self-representation with a theatrical conception of spectatorship, inspired by Adam Smith, in order to argue that the selfie has the potential to operate as a significant ethico-political spectacle in the spaces of Western publicity. I exemplify my argument by using the remediation of migrant and refugee selfies in mainstream news as a case study of “symbolic bordering”—as a technology of power that couples the geopolitical bordering of migrants in the outskirts of Europe with practices of “symbolic bordering” that appropriate, marginalize, or displace their digital testimonies in Western news media.     

Using Photographs to Assess Equity Climate: A Taxonomy

Our challenge as teachers and as human beings is to begin the process of "changing our voices," facing who we are and what that means in a society based on power and oppression. We must learn to listen to others, so we can speak together with voices both united and unique. The journey described is personal, yet it is also generalizable. Changing one's voice may be the only real way in which a teacher can be a model of diversity and multiculturalism. If as a teacher I do nothing to change my own voice, I have accomplished little in terms of effective teaching. My attitudes, behaviors, words should reflect and embody humanity, not just those who "look" like me or are thought of as more capable learners. I must challenge my students' thinking in terms of diversity and multicultural issues and push them to think of the "other."     

Rethinking the Rural Idyll

ABSTRACT

This article traces the profound social repercussions that resulted from the mass enlistment of British office workers into the armed forces during the First World War. Drawing heavily upon fictionalized autobiographies of the period, my study examines the various stages of the clerk's experience of the conflict and argues that the confidence gained during warfare by surviving office workers fundamentally shaped a more democratic postwar society. This change is evidenced, I argue, in the profile of the fictional clerk that emerges in British literature after 1918.     

Disassembling the Model Minority: Asian Pacific Islander Identities and Their Schooling Experiences

When I was in kindergarten, I was always in trouble. During recess I either sat on the benches or stood up against the wall. I had few friends; I always seemed to get into arguments with my classmates no matter if they were Filipino American like me, or European American, or African American, or Latinos. I always caused problems for my teacher. Mrs. H. always tried to silence me when I would try and engage in a discussion as to why I was in trouble. Once I got punished for not doing my class work correctly. We were to watch a movie when we all finished coloring our pictures. I hurried to finish my picture so I could join my classmates on the round carpet. I was so proud of my work I ran up to show Mrs. H. I was halted in mid stride by Mrs. M., the aide, and told to return to my seat. Mrs. H. examined my picture and proceeded to show the class how wrong my picture was. My picture was not done correctly because I colored outside of the lines of the lion's mane. As punishment I had to sit in the corner and color another lion picture as the class got to watch the movie. Every so often I would lean back in my chair and get a glimpse of the movie. I would be redirected to my work when Mrs. H. would yell at me to return to my seat and remind me I wasn't part of the group. All I wanted to do was be with everyone else. Was I really wrong to color outside the lines or did I have fine motor issues that needed to be addressed?     

Book Review of "Fan Cultures," by Matt Hills

This article is a reflexive account of my geographical, intellectual, and emotional journeys as I studied the telenovela genre in my native Venezuela. As such, it focuses on the process as opposed to the findings of my research. I trace the personal and academic reasons for my interest in telenovelas, and how this important genre provides an entrance to study the inextricable links of culture, media, and society in a social formation I know well. As I wrestle with the strengths, weaknesses, and implications of my two identities-Venezuelan woman, U.S.-educated feminist scholar-I flesh out the paradoxes, struggles, contradictions, predicaments, and pleasures that are part and parcel of my research experience, trying to understand how these inform my scholarship.     

Afro-Asian solidarity and the “capital” question: looking beyond the last frontier

The argument in this paper is a continuation of an argument that I have been making for some time, which questions the universal history of capital, crucial to which are assumptions regarding its historical necessity. Capital is not only understood to be a historically unavoidable condition but one that has already colonized the world such that there is no outside to it. In developing my argument regarding the “outside” to capital, where I find Kalyan Sanyal's work very useful and significant, I claim that much of the problem with theorizing capital today has to do not with the beast itself but with the inherited paraphernalia of western theory and philosophy. After a survey of the passive revolution debate in India, which I read as a sign of the actual impossibility of “capitalist” development across different parts of the world, I move on to argue that both “capital/ism” and the “logic of capital” (accumulation) are misleading concepts concealing an essential “emptiness,” which I work out through the idea of “dependent arising” taken from Buddhist philosophy.     

A More Perfect European Union?: The Transnational Networks of the European Union’s Embassy Open House in Washington,D.C.

Annually, the Delegation of the European Union (EU) in Washington, D.C., holds an embassy open house day for its 27 member nations to celebrate European culture and educate tourists on the functions of EU politics and international relations. Amidst an ongoing debt crisis and a continuing exploration of its identity as a supranational entity, “Embassy Day” affords an opportunity to see the EU as a spatial network uneasily caught in the tensions between the often nostalgic nationalism of its constituent countries and the future-oriented technocratic transnationalism of its composite alliance. By analyzing the cultural artifacts of Embassy Day from its handouts, maps, speeches, architecture, and performances, I treat Embassy Day as a “rhetorical experience” and the EU embassies as a transnational network imposed over the city space of Washington, D.C. In the process, I argue that the very fragmented nature of the open house’s complex simulation of Europe mirrors the fragmented nature of European identity itself, and thus displays the anxiety around how the EU places itself and its power vis-à-vis the global community.     

The lyrics of laborious life: popular music and the reassertion of migrant manhood in Northeastern Thailand

Abstract

The focal subject under investigation in this paper is the gendered identities of overseas male migrant workers as presented in the contemporary popular song lyrics from Northeastern Thailand. My reading of such lyrics is informed by my ethnographic fieldwork of Thai migrant workers in Singapore. I intend to uncover some complex, cultural junctures of transnational labor migration, in which men, mobility, and music have come across and formed a social force to reshape cultural imagination of migrant manhood. I argue that popular music celebrates male heroism of overseas migrant workers. Instead of challenging existing structures of hegemonic masculinity in the region, popular song texts poetically reaffirm and reassert the traditional dominant gender ideology and cultural practice. Overseas workmen are usually depicted as hard‐working, self‐sacrificial heroes in their attempts to rescue their families as well as romantic, caring lovers and morally responsible fathers.     

Just Change the Channel: Media Violence and the Lack of Sociological Imagination

The lack of sociological imagination (Mills, 1959/2000) exhibited throughout U.S. American culture functions as a rhetorical obstacle that constrains Americans from understanding the media in ways that are oppositional or media literate. In this study, I administered a qualitative questionnaire to 127 students at a liberal arts institution, in which students were asked to discuss their opinions about media violence. Their responses suggested a lack of sociological imagination in three ways: (a) They understood the impact of media violence in personal, but not political, terms; (b) they understood media "effects" in simplistic and unsophisticated ways; and (c) they understood themselves to be passive media consumers, as opposed to active media citizens.     

Participatory Deep Learning in a Diverse Class on Minority Literatures

This paper is a reflexive exploration of my teaching and evaluation techniques in a diverse class on minority literature. I explain my classroom evaluation and teaching techniques in offering an African literature course as a junior African professor trained outside the United States and teaching in a predominantly white institution. Using Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Greg Light, Roy Cox, and Susanna Calkins, I assess my effectiveness as a student-centered teacher, pointing out my shortcomings and suggesting ways in which I will overcome these obstacles in future courses.     

春

这些日子,为着观赏园子里的小落叶松,我每天早上都朝园子的方向散步。世上再也没有哪种颜色比现在落叶松的颜色更可爱了,它们简直让我眼前一亮,备感愉悦,沁入心底。但是这种美似乎转瞬即失。不经意间已有一抹翠绿转入夏目的清素无华。春去冬来,落叶松都有它无与伦比的关丽的瞬间,这已足以使人欣赏它了。     

Tales of the Unexpected

ABSTRACT

Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. I have refuted this principle and made an attempt to show its inherent contradictoriness. I encourage historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to grand historical narratives through the use of a research model which I call the ‘singularization of history’. In this article I show how the use of the traditional microhistorical methods blinded me in a research project. This blind spot in my research caused a major oversight in my findings – a shocking sequence of events was brought to my attention from an unexpected direction and revealed the weakness in my approach. The article deals with the need to rethink the whole concept of historical research and how the methods of microhistory can play a role there with the aid of what I call the ‘textual environment’.     

Pedagogy and Foreignness

Based on my reflections on “being a foreigner,” I explore the boundaries of citizenship education in this essay. I use my foreign identity to articulate how social justice education can perpetuate closed-mindedness in classrooms by moving too quickly to student activism. I situate my experiences and reflections on being a foreigner within previous conversations about notions of certainty and indoctrination in the field of education philosophy, and I make an argument to create a safe intellectual space for my students. Creating such space is not neglecting moral responsibility or perpetuating privilege but actually navigating through the binary between “us” and “them.”     

Reading by Said's Lantern: Orientalism and Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe

This paper takes Edward Said's foundational critique of Western discourses of knowledge about the "Orient" as a way of intervening in the tradition of reading Chaucer's only scientific text, The Treatise on the Astrolabe. I argue for recognizing the "colour" of Chaucer's originary text of "Messahala, an Arabic astronomer, by religion a Jew", and against naturalising the Treatise as an "unmarked white" text. My argument is that there are cultural and political values at stake in Chaucer's pedagogical text.     

Neo-Platonism in Ibn Khaldūn's Poetics

This article analyses the presence of Neo-Platonic ideas in the poetics of Ibn Khaldūn's (1332–1406). It particularly focuses on the sixth part of the Muqaddima, in which Ibn Khaldūn presents the Arab-Islamic system of knowledge. I argue that Ibn Khaldūn analyses poetry in terms of a peculiar kind of knowledge and that his views on poetry are largely dominated by a Neo-Platonic paradigm, deriving from Avicenna's Psychology and Sufism. I focus on four topics: the “weak” rational position of poetics among the sciences of logic; the rhetorical norm of mu?ābaqa (“conformity” between “words” and “ideas”, and between “speech” and the “requirement of the situation”), the musical norm of talā?um (appropriateness of note combinations) and the notion of poetical “models” (uslūb; pl. asālīb). My conclusion is that the Muqaddima provides the modern reader with a precious longue-durée overall view of pre-modern Arab-Islamic poetics.     

The Summer of Friendship by Fire: A Doctoral Student Reminisces about Lessons in Diversity

The journey toward becoming a multicultural person is not easy and is never finished. As an educational administrator in a tri-cultural state, I felt comfortable that I was proficient in dealing with diversity. Only when I began a doctoral program at a major Texas university was my naivety exposed. I quickly learned that experience in working with diverse populations and the ability to relate effectively to people of different ethnic backgrounds were vastly different. The two years I spent deeply immersed in a multiculturally rich cohort of doctoral students changed me. My eyes were opened to injustices that I had never before seen as I vicariously experienced life through the eyes of the “other.” Today, I am a professor at a regional university. My experiences, focused through the lens of theory, are the basis for the message to my students. I have traveled the road before and can now point the way toward a broader definition of acceptance and tolerance.     

KASHGAR： A Place as Beautiful as Jade

Kashgar means "a jade-like place" in the Uyghur language, because it is known for its vast reserve of beautiful jade stone. Human activities such as hunting and fishing existed here as early as 4000 years ago. About 2000 years ago, one of the 36 kingdoms in the West Region is located here. Shule Kingdom built its capital city in Kashgar during the West Han Dynasty of ancient China and it became one of the four most important towns in the West Region during the Tang Dynasty. Kashgar is no…