Introduction

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay identifies the major themes of the special issue, emphasizing both indigenous peoples' anticipation of how imperial modernity hailed them and their determination to work with as well as against it. The mobility, and restlessness, of the actors examined in the essays that follow helped to guarantee this defensive agency and to produce a shared grammar of engagement and resistance across disparate native communities in the nineteenth and twentieth-century worlds they travelled through.     

Towards the westernized body: a popular narrative reinforced by men's lifestyle magazines in Indonesia

This paper will spotlight changing views with regard to Indonesian men's body aesthetics. It will explore how, in response to discourse contained in lifestyle magazines, the physical bodies of Indonesian men have become the primary mechanism through which to exercise agency. However, many local Indonesian customs consider men's agency to be dependent upon their ability to control bodily desire. The paper aims to give an overview of how modernization and westernization as contemporary conditions in postcolonial Indonesia serve as the background to the narratives provided by men's lifestyle magazines. In order to provide an insight into how modern white narratives are valued in Indonesia, I will begin by examining the history of Dutch colonialism as a basis for racial classification. Proceeding, I will discuss how that history relates to contemporary practices of social stratification: the belief that being married to a westerner will bring perfection to one's descendants’ genes; the trend of consuming special vitamins and formulas that will change particular parts of the body; and the assumption that having western genes will bring both success and wealth. Moreover, I will also discuss the ways in which the magazines define the “ideal” body, and how that “ideal” body thus becomes the hegemonic body – one that functions as the gateway for men to achieve a good life.     

When is a discovery? The affective dimensions of discovery in music consumption

ABSTRACT

This article explores the concept of music discovery and seeks to provide a definition of the act of discovering music content. Research on music consumption has weakly theorized what the moment of “discovery” consists of, since it has been more preoccupied with debates about the conditions of discoveries, which either highlight the importance of individuals’ social milieus or the enhanced technological agency that they enjoy in the digital age. Drawing on qualitative data about musical experiences, this article frames discoveries as affective responses to music content that occur within individuals’ life narratives and mediate their interpretation and definition of music.     

“Piety Stories”: Muslim Tatar Women’s Identity Performance,Negotiation, and Transformation through Storytelling

This article examines “piety stories”—Muslim Tatar women’s narratives about adopting daily Islamic practices, such as five prayers or headscarves, in Tatarstan, Russia. I argue that sharing piety stories is a communicative way of performing identities, negotiating group memberships, and reaffirming one’s commitment to Muslim piety. These narratives provide a discursive way for the speaker to practice being a Muslim and for the audience, a blueprint for becoming one. By detailing a way of being where Muslim piety becomes one’s moral compass and source of agency, piety stories illustrate a culturally meaningful relationship among identity, Muslim piety, and local communicative practices.     

Negotiations of cultural identities by Indian women engineering students in US engineering programmes

The paper analyses the identities of Indian women engineers in the gendered organizational context of US engineering programmes. Participant narratives discuss the ways in which women are subjected to identity struggles in India due to gendered patrifocal norms that impose structural, societal, and familial pressures on women. Subsequently, when these women enter US engineering programmes, they encounter a highly masculine organizational and cultural space. Participants discuss identity dislocations, transformations, and assimilation as they seek to meld into the existing structures and find a career trajectory. I draw upon liminality theory to explore the cultural transitions, identity restructuring, and negotiations of Indian women engineers, navigating the intersections of competing and intersecting cultural norms of gender and engineering in India and the US, work, and family. The findings indicate the layers of gendered ideology that constitute engineering education in India and the US, the societal pressures of marriage and family rooted in patrifocal Indian norms, the barriers to finding an engineering job, the resources within the structures that support women, and the identification of patriarchy as the enactment of agency and as a site for change.     

Do EFL Teachers ‘Critically’ Engage in Cultural Awareness? A Mixed-Method Investigation

ABSTRACT

This study explored 150 EFL teachers’ perceptions of critical cultural awareness (CCA) considering their teaching context, academic degree, and professional development programs. The participants all completed the CCA questionnaire, fifteen of whom also sat a semi-structured qualitative interview. Our findings showed, a) EFL teachers’ perceptions of CCA located at a medium level, b) the PhD participants showed significantly higher engagement in CCA than their BA and MA counterparts, c) private language institute teachers reported higher levels of CCA than their state-run school counterparts and d) local professional development programs did not emphasize culture teaching in general and CCA in particular.     

Negotiating Narratives of Human Trafficking: NGOs,Communication and the Power of Culture

This article draws on interviews with anti-trafficking NGO employees in Thailand to illustrate the use of narratives as a tool for communicating cultural values. Drawing on theories of modernization, culture, and liberation psychology, I assess the way anti-trafficking NGO employees construct narratives, or “stories,” about human trafficking. These narratives rely on Western values associated with modernization, the role of NGOs in development, gendered constructions of victimhood, “Othering,” and Orientalism. Analyzing these narratives, I build a theory of “culture as a space of safety:” a self-reinforcing mechanism whereby employees ritualistically retreat from the overwhelming circumstances they confront in their work.     

Political Prisoners' Memoirs in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

Prison narratives are a key genre of African nationalist writing. They offer a unique window onto the relationships between the personal and political, the self and nation. This article focuses on the memoirs of three Zimbabwean political prisoners in order to explore claims to agency in prison, constructions of gender and race, and the complexities of individual passages within the collective narrative of nationalism. The memoirs are revealing of a formative period in Zimbabwean nationalism, and of the individuals and ideas that shaped independent Zimbabwe.     

Becoming Canadian: Immigrant narratives of professional attainment

We investigate how economic immigrants in Canada negotiate their identity in the process of “becoming Canadian” through an analysis of public texts. Drawing on the master narrative framework, we examine the interplay between individual and societal narratives as immigrants grapple with the tension between notions of “desirable” immigrants as those that are well integrated professionally and the reality of facing career related barriers. Among those whose success stories align with the master narrative of professional attainment there was little questioning of this expectation, thereby allowing it to remain invisible. Among those who had not (yet) achieved work related success in the receiving country, they tended to engage alternative narratives elaborating on the antecedents, outcomes, and barriers to labor market participation. Despite the countering nature of these alternative narratives, they strengthen the societal expectation of professional success as a key pathway to inclusion, thereby reinforcing the rigidity of this narrative. We contribute to literature on the social construction of national identity by examining the process of becoming national and the role of labor market participation in immigrants’ perceptions of inclusion in their new society. Our study highlights the importance of including immigrants’ voices in the construction of a more inclusive society, which may aid in breaking down exclusionary narratives of national identity.     

Nobility,women and historical narratives of the crusades and the latin east

Historical narratives of the crusades and Latin settlement in the Levant, like other medieval literature, provide slim details about women. In medieval society Latin literary education was dominated by a predominantly male and ecclesiastical hierarchy, which reflected the views of a patriarchal social system and marginalised the public role of women. Crusade narratives in particular have been criticised for their negative attitude towards women, mirroring a lack of ecclesiastical enthusiasm at their involvement in the crusade movement. Histories about crusading and events in the Latin East were often written for, and in some cases by, the lay nobility who took part in crusades and settled in the holy land. These texts were sometimes used as propaganda to encourage nobles to take the cross, and much of the imagery within them had didactic elements. In the case of women, they provided models for behaviour according to social and marital status. A consistently negative portrayal of women was doubtless impossible due to the number of important noblewomen who took the cross, and their value in cementing political alliances between western Europe and the Latin East through marriage. This article contends that it is the complex links between crusade narratives and the nobility, in terms of participation and patronage, audience, subject matter and values – crusade as a “noble” pursuit – which helps to explain the discrepancy between established ecclesiastical views and the portrayal of women in historical narratives about crusading and settlement in the East. In order to establish this idea effectively, several main themes must be addressed, including the role of crusade texts within the context of contemporary noble culture, and crusade narratives as source material for noble values concerning women. To begin, however, it is necessary to provide some background on attitudes towards women and crusade, as well as the concept of nobility and the noblewoman's place in medieval society.     

‘It’s in the Blood,isn’t it?’ The Contested Status of First World War Veterans in Second World War Civil Defence

This article examines how ex-servicemen’s memories of the First World War shaped their experience of working in civil defence during the Second. In response to ongoing public criticism of civil defence as a whole and a dismissive attitude towards veterans in particular, these men expressed a distinct form of ‘useful masculinity’, rooted in their combat experience and developed within the particular context of civil defence. I will argue that through the group setting in which remembering took place, veterans were able to oppose dominant cultural narratives and to develop and express these alternative narratives about their value.     

Make my life easier

Included in this section are a number of self‐narratives uttered by a new generation of Taiwanese transgenders who have been forming/negotiating their transgender identity and trajectories of trans life amidst the rigidity of the gender binary as well as the complexities of emerging gender/sexuality movements and identity politics in Taiwan. These self‐narratives, spoken not as conciliatory attempts to win medical approval but as honest efforts to communicate with kindred spirits on friendly occasions, provide us with a rare opportunity to glimpse not only the inner struggles of varied transgender lives, but also the unspoken fluidity and multiplicities of identity and desire that gender/sexuality theories as well as movements have yet to grasp.     

Explicating anomie in refugee women’s integration narratives: A qualitative research study

Refugee women flee from their home countries due to civil unrest, war, persecution and migrate to Western countries such as the United States in search of a safe haven. This research study conducted in an Upper Midwest community in the US unveils integrations experiences of refugee women from their standpoint. The integration narratives obtained through in-depth interviews with 16 refugee women aged 40 years and above depicted traits of anomie as described by Emile Durkheim and Robert Merton. Excerpts from the integration narratives conveyed anomic traits such as feelings of, loneliness and sadness, lack of purpose/meaning, unmet expectations, feeling isolated, and retreatism mode of adaptation. Using these themes, the study explored how such experiences reinforce anomie among the refugee women. Although this research study does not claim universal representation of refugee women experiences, the discussion provided serves to help communities understand the women’s integration experiences and implement structures and practical guidelines for successful integration.     

Reconciling before educating? Narratives of conflict and peace among teachers in Côte d’Ivoire

While teachers are generally perceived as positive agents of change in post-conflict countries, recently researchers have started questioning teachers’ ability and willingness to teach ‘peace’ after conflict. The vast majority of these studies have been qualitative in nature. The current paper makes an important contribution to this debate by analysing quantitatively how teachers’ narratives of the violent past affect their teaching practices in Côte d’Ivoire, a country that emerged from violent conflict in 2011. Drawing on a survey conducted among secondary school teachers (n = 984) in Abidjan, we show that teachers remain sharply divided along ethno-political lines concerning their perceptions of the past conflict and current peace and reconciliation process. There also exists a potentially problematic relation between these narratives and teachers’ teaching practices: Teachers in support of the narrative associated with the current government seem much more willing to discuss their country’s violent past in the classroom than others.     

What Shall I Do With This Sword? Narrative,Speech and Politics in the Carnation Revolution

The vast grassroots movement triggered by the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal represented an enormous challenge to filmic and literary representation. This article analyses how writers and filmmakers tried to come to terms with the event, in particular how they managed to incorporate the proliferation of written and oral discourses during the revolutionary process into their narratives. In the context of an event so deeply influenced by Marxist political cultures that aimed to collapse the distinction between theory and practice, these narratives will also allow us to consider the challenges posed by the history of communism to cultural history.     

Use of evaluative devices by youth for sense-making of culturally diverse interpersonal interactions

Building upon recent research that defines psychological development as a continuous process of sense-making situated within a cultural and historical context, this paper explores how culturally diverse youth growing up in New York City use evaluative language to enact relational complexity as they make sense of technologically mediated interpersonal interactions with their peers. Forty-four individuals (ages 15–20) participated in a quasi-experimental research workshop that engaged them in the process of sense-making by asking them to write projective narratives toward a vignette depicting text-massage mediated interpersonal interaction embedded among monocultural and bicultural group of peers. Data analyses focus on evaluative devices used by youth and manifest the relational flexibility of sense-making by immigrant youth and their U.S. born peers across diverse relational dimensions. Results suggest that immigrant youth are able to coordinate diverse ways of interpreting interpersonal interactions across relational dimensions, manifest by varied use of logical/hypothetical, causal and affective evaluative devices. In contrast U.S. born youth largely use same frequency of evaluative devices across two relational dimensions. Statistical analysis highlights the use of affect in projective narratives by exploring a discursive learning hypothesis: that higher use of emotions in the process of sense-making by U.S. born youth gradually scaffolds the use of emotions in narrative by immigrant youth.     

Disrupting Whitestream Measures of Quality Teaching: The Community Cultural Wealth of Teachers of Color

Discussions of teacher preparation, qualifications, and effectiveness are at the heart of increasing attacks on public education. In this article, we contribute to the growing body of literature that works to challenge the narrowing parameters of what is considered effective teacher pedagogy, particularly as it relates to the noted value of teachers of color. We argue that racial justice-oriented teachers of color—teachers who recognize structural racial inequities and strive for transformation—provide important, yet invisible labor in our nation's schools. Using a community cultural wealth (CCW) framework, we illuminate multiple strengths and contributions that racial justice-oriented teachers of color bring to the profession that go largely unnoticed by whitestream—Eurocentrism as a norm—measures of teacher quality. In an analysis of data from interviews, digital narratives, and questionnaires, we present counter-narratives—oppositional stories told from the vantage point of the oppressed—of women of color educators to show how their positionalities as teachers of color, community members, and activists, provide insights to the experiences and needs of students that often go unrecognized. This research expands our understanding of overlooked pedagogical characteristics that are foundational to serving students of color and should be incorporated into the way we prepare teachers and the educational administrators who evaluate them.     

Language choice and global learning networks: The pitfall of “lingua franca” approaches to classroom telecomputing 1

This article examines students' narrative responses to reading professional literacy histories. Demonstrating the importance of narrative as a way of learning, it shows how elementary education majors of diverse backgrounds explore their relation with language in a traditional grammar class. Cajun, Creole, and African American students recover their literacy histories and articulate the relation between the loss of language and the loss of culture and heritage. Drawing on the parallels between their discourse histories and the discourse histories of other cultures, these narratives also suggest that the students are now able to establish their linguistic identity and develop a greater sensitivity to the situations of their own students in the multicultural classrooms of southwest Louisiana.     

Secondary Cultures and Their Impact as Intermediaries on Refugee Adaptation to Host Cultures: Connections of Community*

This is a qualitative study examining aspects of refugee adaptation. As refugees negotiate an adaptation process into their host cultures, secondary communities, those who possess certain commonalities and similarities with the newcomers, often act as intermediaries between the refugee groups and host cultures. This article aims to answer the question: how does a refugee group’s extended community of an intermediary group influence the group’s adaptation to their new environment and social context? The study is an examination of narratives of a particular refugee group in the United States, called Meskhetian Turks, ethnically Turkish refugees from Russia.