Cultural Continuities

ABSTRACT

This article studies the Nazis' enthusiastic embrace of theatre in the period before and during the Second World War, and places this in a longer tradition of political power and the theatre in Germany. It argues that Hitler, Goering and Goebbels oversaw a ‘restoration’ of German theatre in the later 1930s, aiming to restore the emotional link between audience, Kultur and nation, for their own political purposes.     

Votary,Vixen and Vulgarian: German governesses and English Domesticity in Novels by Charlotte Yonge,Charlotte Brontë and Mary Braddon

ABSTRACT

Among the most amusing vignettes in Victorian novels are German governesses created by Charlotte Yonge, Charlotte Brontë and Mary Braddon. Fräulein Ohnglaube is a votary who believes in ghosts. Fräulein Müller is a vixen with a secret ambition, and Fräulein Braun is a vulgarian who scoffs two breakfasts of beef and beer. All are depicted as potential threats to the values and norms of the English ‘cult’ of domesticity.This paper argues that these authors wished to preserve and celebrate ‘pure‘ English domesticity . Their negative representations of German governesses reveal how thoroughly English and anti-cosmopolitan were their conceptualisations of domestic life.     

Validation of a German Version of the Cultural Intelligence Scale

Intercultural competence plays a crucial role in increasingly multicultural societies. The Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) has proven to be a promising approach to measure intercultural competence in a variety of contexts. Despite its use as a reliable and valid instrument across the globe, however, the CQS has not yet been systematically validated for German-speaking countries. Therefore, the present study examined the psychometric properties, factor structure, and convergent and discriminant validity of a German translation of the CQS in two distinct samples (N_{Study 1} = 392; N_{Study 2} = 414). Across both studies, a bi-factorial model with three specific (i.e., cognitive, behavioral, and motivational CQ) and a general CQ factor best reflected the data. The results demonstrated good psychometric properties and promising results regarding the convergent and discriminant validity of the general factor whereas the incremental validity of the specific factors requires further consideration.     

Chains of Gold: Portuguese Migration to Argentina in Transatlantic Perspective. By Marcelo J. Borges

ABSTRACT

The trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 and its subsequent publishing success sparked intense debate at the time and have come to exemplify a clash of worlds, one Victorian, repressed, deferential, restricted by class assumptions and hopelessly out of touch, the other progressive, open, liberated and, above all, permissive, that most value-laden and controversial of terms. Yet examining popular responses to Lady Chatterley's Lover reveals complex attitudes and raises questions about the permissiveness of the 1960s.     

The Print Cultures of the Celtic Languages, 1700–1900

ABSTRACT

While the cultural trajectories of the Celtic language communities have some broad similarities in the long term, their histories in the medium term were quite different. The article approaches this issue through a comparative analysis of the print cultures of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Breton and Irish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The approach is both quantitative and qualitative, surveying total production in the four languages as well as looking at the presence and absence of different genres in the different languages. It also examines diaspora publishing in America and Australia. The different patterns are explained primarily in terms of the nature and extent of institutional church support for publishing in those languages.     

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.     

African Students’ Identity Negotiation and Relational Conflict Management: Being “Foreign”, Being “Careful”

ABSTRACT

International students face challenges associated with identity negotiation as they interact with others who may hold distinctly differing worldviews while operating from a position of cultural dominance. The current study explores how African students negotiate identity in interactions with domestic students within a relational-conflict context. Themes emerging include uncertainty in self-presentation, constrained relationships with domestic students, and avoidance as a response to relational conflict. The emergent concept is that of “being careful”, attributable to African students’ perception of power differences between foreign and domestic students, as well as risk associated with assertive conflict behavior. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Photographing Disabled Children in Imperial and Weimar Germany

ABSTRACT

This article relates the discovery of an archive of photographs of disabled children, made in the period 1910–33 by the German Association for Cripple Care. It discusses the practical, political and ethical issues relating to the academic use of the collection, and focuses on four particular images, placing them in the changing ideological and political contexts of the period.     

Generations of 68Ers

ABSTRACT

The protests of ‘1968’ are a powerful symbol of generational belonging and central to Germany's collective memory. The so-called ‘68ers’ have been transformed into a mythical yardstick of what constitutes a generation. Yet few people thought of themselves in this way in the late 1960s: the idea of the ‘68er’ only emerged from complex and often retrospective processes of generational building, which this article investigates. It is shown that such age-related affinities were not confined to members of the West German Left. Two alternative generational narratives that emerged out of the late 1960s are examined in this piece: those of the West German moderate right-wing ‘counter-generation’ and of the ‘East German 68ers’. The antagonistic character of the West German events and the subsequent public projection of left-wing activists as a ‘generation’ mobilized their political contemporaries and led to a growing desire to collectivize their experiences in their turn. East Germany's ‘1968’, on the other hand, may have been far less iconic than the West German revolt, but former East German activists have also given their memories generational form, particularly since the 1990s. This article addresses these manifold processes of generation building to show that they have much to reveal about how activists—and those who observed them—made sense of the events of 1968 and about how different groups mobilized the idea of a generational experience politically to powerful effect in the years that followed. We are not dealing with a single and monolithic generation of 1968, but with more diverse communities of German ‘68ers’.     

Literature and poetry

On native ground: memoirs and impressions. Jim Barnes, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997, 279 pages, $27.95 (hardcover). ISBN 0–8061–2898–4.

Caucasia. Danzy Senna, New York: Putnam Publishing Group, 1998, 353 pages, $24.95 (hardcover). ISBN 1–5732–2091–4.

Boyhood, Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology (2nd ed.). Franklin Abbott (Ed.), Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, 279 pages, $15.95 (softcover). ISBN 0–2991–5754–7.

Readings in African Popular Culture. Karin Barber (Ed.), Bloomington, IN: International African Institute in association with Indiana University Press, 1997, 192 pages plus index, $18.95 (soft‐cover), $45.00 (clothcover). ISBN 0–2532–1140–9 (softcover); 0–2533–3294‐X (clothcover). For orders, phone 1–800–842–6796.     

Far away from home and (not) lonely: Relational mobility in migrants’ heritage culture as a potential protection from loneliness

Loneliness is a major health risk with particular relevance for migrants, who are faced with the challenge of establishing social networks to avoid social isolation after migration. We suggest that forming new relationships may be hampered or facilitated by characteristics of migrants’ heritage culture (i.e., the culture that migrants were socialized in), specifically the level of heritage relational mobility (the amount of opportunities to form new relationships and individual choice regarding whom to relate to in the heritage culture). Individuals with higher (versus lower) heritage relational mobility may be able to more easily establish social networks after migration, because of being more experienced with forming new social relationships. As such, we hypothesized that they might be less susceptible to loneliness after migrating – at least in a host culture that is high in relational mobility. In two cross-sectional survey studies with samples from two of the largest groups of student migrants in the city of Groningen (Study 1: n = 118 German, n = 97 Chinese students; Study 2: n = 119 German, n = 92 Chinese students) in the Netherlands (i.e., a context with high relational mobility), higher heritage relational mobility was indeed related to lower loneliness. Having grown up in a cultural environment that offers opportunities to individually establish new social relationships may hence protect migrants from quite different heritage cultures from loneliness, at least if the host culture also offers such opportunities. We discuss alternative explanations, as well as theoretical and practical implications.     

Indigenous patterns of music discovery: Khwe Bushmen and hip-hop in Platfontein,South Africa

ABSTRACT

Hip-hop has become a platform for young Khwe Bushmen to negotiate restrictive urban spaces following the tribe’s resettlement near the city of Kimberley in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. Previous studies on music discovery tend to ignore the plight of indigenous and rural youth who struggle to keep up with the pace of global trends. Using qualitative data obtained through participatory observation, interviews, and focus group discussions, I argue that class remains a significant factor in the discovery of music. In many African indigenous communities, a few persons with higher socioeconomic status play a significant role in the acculturation and distribution of digital music and music cultures.     

Relations between positive and negative extended contact experiences and prejudice in host society and refugees: Effects of positive and negative direct contact

ObjectiveIn a migration context, we analyzed interaction effects of positive and negative extended contact and between valenced-extended and valenced-direct contact on prejudice in the acculturation process between host society members and refugees.MethodsTwo studies analyzed relations between valenced-extended contact and prejudice in German majority group members (N = 389, Study 1) and refugees (N = 816, Study 2). Regression models tested valenced-extended contact effects, interactions between valenced-extended contacts, and moderation by valenced-direct contact.ResultsInteraction analyses showed significant interactions between valenced-extended contact experiences in both samples. Furthermore, analyses showed that positive direct contact can facilitate prejudice reduction through positive extended contact in majority group members and buffers the relation between positive extended contact and lower levels of prejudice in minority group members. Negative direct contact was found to be positively associated with prejudice through negative extended contact but was unable to affect the relations between positive extended contact and lower levels of prejudice.ConclusionInteractions between positive and negative extended contact and their interactions with valenced-direct contact are significantly associated with prejudice in majority and minority group members. Valenced-direct contact can facilitate or buffer the effects of valenced-extended contact and interactions have a significant impact on prejudice especially if valence of contact experiences is matched.     

Feeling at home in the “Chocolate City”: an exploration of place-making practices and structures of belonging amongst Africans in Guangzhou

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the shifts brought about by the emergence of Asia as a key player in global capitalism have led to countless Africans opting for Asian destinations as part of their trade and migration strategies. The implications of the constant ebb and flow of African entrepreneurs in Southern China and the transnational trajectories, connections, and practices they enable have been relatively understudied. This article focuses on place-making practices and structures of belonging surrounding those Africans living in (and circulating through) Guangzhou. Drawing on my fieldwork, I locate possibilities for place-making and belonging within transnational multiethnic microcommunities and highlight practices that have emerged from the assembling of transnational and translocal flows in residential clusters, community organisations, and religious congregations. I contend that the presence and intermingling of diverse transient subjects (both African and Chinese) nurtures “alternative imaginations” of self, place, home, and belonging that alter extant notions of national and cultural identity, ethnicity, and race in twenty-first century Asia.     

Olive Schreiner,Epistolary Practices and Microhistories

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the letters of the South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), this article explores Schreiner's strategic uses of letter-writing as a key tool in her work as a cultural entrepreneur in a number of different social and political contexts. In advocating a microhistory approach which recognizes that macro and micro are interconnected and should be seen as lenses of perspective rather than as separate spheres, we examine various strands of Schreiner's ‘cultural project’ and consider how her epistolary activities articulated and furthered this.     

Music and Middle-Class Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Leipzig and Birmingham

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the making of bourgeois cultural identity by way of analysing and comparing the ethos and organization of Leipzig's Gewandhaus and Birmingham's Triennial Festival during the nineteenth century. Whilst the origins of Leipzig's music culture are placed firmly within the emergent tradition of Kantian and Romantic idealism and the eighteenth-century revival of classicism which informed the cultural and educational ethos of the German Bürgertum, the beginnings of Birmingham's music culture are placed within the context of British empiricism. Both are then substantiated through an empirical analysis of concert repertoires, journals, newspapers and attitudes towards conductors and artists.     

Texts

Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. Richard Delgado (Ed.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995, 592 pages, $29.95 (softcover). ISBN 1–5663–9348–5.

Dreamseekers: Creative Approaches to the African American Heritage. Anita Manley and Cecily O'Neill (Eds.), Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997, 175 pages, $24.50 (softcover). ISBN 0–4350–7045–2.

Places of Memory: Whiteman's Schools and Native American Communities. Alan Peshkin, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997, 150 pages, $22.50 (softcover). ISBN 0–8058–2469–3.     

Mastic Production in Medieval Chios: Economic Flows and Transitions in an Insular Setting

ABSTRACT

The Aegean island of Chios provides a special case of insularity during the Middle Ages, aspects of which are reflected in the production of a highly-valued product, mastic resin, which was sought after across the Mediterranean world for use in medicine, fragrances and flavourings. Produced only on the island, high-quality mastic became an iconic Chian product that highlighted the island’s uniqueness and significantly contributed to its economy. This article presents a diachronic view of mastic production in and circulation from Chios during the periods of Roman, Byzantine and Genoese rule. The widespread demand for its luxury commodity meant that the island was always active in the wider maritime networks in this period. The lens of mastic production makes these connections visible in textual, archaeological and architectural evidence that highlights the role local products played in the ways islands, like Chios, navigated the economic and political transitions of the medieval Mediterranean world.     

September 11 and its aftermath

Abstract

This article deals with a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Asian–African Conference 1955. Held in a modest way, in Yogyakarta, Bandung and Bangkok, the commemoration leaves, a durable contribution: the conference book – an anthology of reflections related to this world historical event. Written by 16 socially engaged intellectuals, academics and activists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and USA, the book is entitled ‘BANDUNG 2005: Rethinking Solidarity in Global Society. The Challenge of Globalisation for Social and Solidarity Movements.’ The objective of the work is to look for alternatives to the present undesirable World Order and Globalisation. Put in the perspective of social history (of social struggle, social movement, or social change), the Yogyakarta Commemoration of the Bandung Asian–African Conference deserves close attention. The actors involved in the publication and in the meeting, the messages they delivered and the projects they proposed, are too important to be ignored. This article presents an analytical review on the commemoration, especially on the content of the book, completed by a concluding remark on the prospect of the movement.