Acts of Irreconcilable Mourning: Post-Holocaust Witness and Testimony

Abstract

This essay revisits the question of post-Shoah responses to cataclysm in light of the now-urgent question of transmission – the shift in mourning and memory between first-generation survivors and later generations. Offering a different but complementary analysis to those in trauma or memory studies, I argue that post-Shoah witness and testimony are acts of ‘irreconcilable mourning’. This sense of mourning departs from post-Freudian approaches that focus on closure. Instead, irreconcilable mourning is a non-totalising approach to loss that resists ‘redemption’ and instead necessitates an ongoing, creative, and critical response to loss. In the course of this argument, I examine first-generation accounts such as Primo Levi's and Elie Wiesel's to highlight the necessity and contingency of transmission by interrogating concepts such as the ‘unsayable’ and the remnant. I then focus on Art Spiegelman's second-generation Maus: A Survivor's Tale, bringing cross-generational questions of witness and testimony as acts of irreconcilable mourning into the fold of Marianne Hirsch's ‘postmemory’ and Edith Wyschogrod's heterological history-telling.     

Why Are Asian Americans Silent? Asian Americans' Negotiation Strategies for Communicative Discriminations

Abstract

This study explores two questions: (1) What types of racially discriminatory messages (RDM) target Asian Americans? (2) What communicative approaches do Asian Americans use to negotiate RDM? An analysis of 176 stories obtained through an online survey revealed seven RDM types (racial slurs, playground teasing, Asian Americans as eternal others, Asians as sexual objects, professional discrimination, Asians are all the same, and alienation within Asian groups). It was found that Asian Americans tend to utilize nonassertive approaches in responding to RDM due to internal/environmental factors including emotional shock and humiliation, a lack of knowledge of proper responses, peer pressure, and strategic intent.     

Communicating across difference: Co-cultural theory,capital and multicultural families in Korea*

Utilizing Orbe’s co-cultural theory and Bourdieu’s theories of capital, this study examines the lived experiences and the communicative interactions employed by members of seven multicultural families in South Korea. Findings show the intertwined roles of economic capital, social capital, cultural capital and symbolic capital with co-cultural communication orientations, when interacting with members of the majority group. Particularly, findings reveal differences between Korean husbands and immigrant wives. For Korean husbands, economic and social capital are the most critical influential factors in their choices of communication orientations, while for immigrant wives, cultural and symbolic capital are most significant. Additionally, contrary to previous research, Confucianism and patriarchy played key roles in the marginalization of Korean men in multicultural families and influenced their co-cultural communication orientations.     

Algorithms,advertising and the intimacy of surveillance

ABSTRACT

This article develops the notion of the intimacy of surveillance, a characteristic of contemporary corporate marketing and dataveillance fueled by the accumulation of consumers’ economically valuable digital traces. By focusing on emotional reactions to targeted advertisements, we demonstrate how consumers want contradictory things: they oppose intrusive and creepy advertising based on tracking their activities, yet expect more relevant real-time analysis and probabilistic predictions anticipating their needs, desires, and plans. The tension between the two opposing aspects of corporate surveillance is crucial in terms of the intimacy of surveillance: it explains how corporate surveillance that is felt as disturbing can co-exist with pleasurable moments of being ‘seen’ by the market. The study suggests that the current situation where social media users are trying to comprehend, typically alone with their devices, what is going on in terms of continuously changing algorithmic systems, is undermining public culture. This calls for collective responses to the shared pleasures and pains while living alongside algorithms. The everyday distress and paranoia to which users of social media are exposed is an indicator of failed social arrangements in need of urgent repair.     

Identifying Communities in Need: Examining the Impact of Acculturation on Perceived Discrimination,Social Support,and Coping amongst Racial Minority Members in the United States

Utilizing a cognitive appraisal approach, this study examines how acculturation affects racial minority members' appraisals of and responses to racial discrimination. Racial minority members (N = 345) completed questionnaires about their prior experiences with racial discrimination and coping responses. Controlling for participants' prior experiences with racial discrimination and primary appraisals, the results revealed that acculturation helped explain individuals' need for social support, support message evaluations, and the pursuit of disengagement coping strategies. Findings from this study provide helpful information for the development of intervention and outreach programs for individuals in our communities who are coping with racial discrimination.     

News Translation and Cultural Resistance

Abstract

News translation, which takes many forms, encounters two types of cultural resistance that hinder intercultural understanding. The first is apparent in the need to transform a text in order to make it meaningful in a new context, while the second results from the irreducibility of culture as a way of life to the form of a text. This article illustrates both forms of resistance by analyzing a story originally broadcast on The National in Canada in 1992, and it concludes by considering the implications of the power relations between journalists and the people they describe in acts of news translation.     

The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action

Abstract

Many critical approaches ascribe a deficit of meaning to technology. The theory of technological action developed in the paper treats technology as an important, eventful terrain for collective life. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s idea of problematisation, it places contemporary technological actions in settings suffused by power relations. It finds in the work of Gilbert Simondon ways of explaining how technological action overflows social norms, forms, identities and structures. Based on analysis of processes of abstraction and concretisation in a spectrum of symptomatic examples, it contends that cultural theory should develop understandings of the potentials that give rise to technological acts as a way of being with others. The paper suggests how cultural theory can engage with the specificities of these actions.     

Outlining a Dialogic Framework of Difference: How do Sri Lankan Tamil Refugees in India Constitute and Negotiate Difference?

Abstract

This article addresses the pedagogical aspects of cross-cultural communication, dialogue and democratic pluralism. Analysis of a classroom conversation about unrepaired levees in New Orleans and the media demonstrates the complexities that can arise when addressing race. Intercultural communication research has offered useful attention to these complexities, which have a direct link to the objectives of dialogue and pluralism. The article asserts that pluralism requires affective and cognitive recognition of that which offends and is beyond one's imagination, and that acts of racialized misrecognition often hold within them the practices of justice and hope.     

Nation branding in contemporary Taiwan: a grassroots perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper, based on textual analysis and interviews, offers a complementary perspective of scholarly studies of nation branding which focus on the state and corporate elites involved in such undertakings. It places grassroots initiatives in branding Taiwan through tourist souvenirs and other video and graphic materials against the larger background of cultural policies and official branding campaigns, and shows grassroots actors’ complex entanglement with official institutions, policies and discourses despite declared scepticism towards the latter and a low degree of direct collaboration. It compares official and grassroots messages and argues that the latter are more coherent; capture a local specificity and encourage a tourist gaze centred around the ‘human touch’ theme; distance themselves from China, the significant ‘other’ of Taiwanese nationalism; and markedly highlight an epistemological and representational strategy based on individual, sensorial experience, which may constitute a response to biased and untrustworthy state national narratives of the martial law era.     

Situating Oneself in a Racialized World: Understanding Student Reactions to Crash through Standpoint Theory and Context-Positionality Frames

Abstract

Through a thematic analysis of 136 student reactions to the movie Crash, this study examines how individuals situate themselves in terms of race, racism, and race relations in the film and how their racial locations inform this situatedness. We utilize principles of standpoint theories as the theoretical framework for the analysis. We first describe this situatedness in terms of six emergent genres of responses that varied across positionality and contextual focus. Then, we discuss how the patterns of responses may be explained through standpoint theories and conversely how the emergent organizing framework may complement standpoint theories.     

Chinese gay men’s coming out narratives: Connecting social relationship to co-cultural theory

Theorizing the intersection of queer identity and culture values, this study examines Chinese gay men’s coming-out experiences through a narrative analysis of 60 self-reported stories online. It finds that Chinese gay men’s decision to come out, their communication orientations, and the outcomes of their coming out are influenced by traditional Chinese cultural values such as family, marriage, and duty. Assertive assimilation, assertive accommodation, and nonassertive accommodation are the most used communication orientations. The study adds to co-cultural theory by demonstrating that types of social relationships affect the communication orientations adopted, at least in the context of China.     

“Why Are You Shoving This Stuff Down Our Throats?”: Preparing Intercultural Educators to Challenge Performances of White Racism

Abstract

In general, white students respond intensely to explorations of racism. Intercultural educators are often unprepared for the challenges white students assert during conversations about racism and are unsure how to reply appropriately. Herein, we offer examples of student responses to critical race pedagogy in order to assist teachers in addressing similar stories told in their own classrooms. Based on data collected from over 300 student assignments collected between fall 2003 and fall 2006, we present a typology that categorizes patterns of white student resistance, including acknowledgement of racism, white self-preservation, diversion from structural power, and investment in white supremacy.     

Workfulness: governing the disobedient brain

ABSTRACT

The Scandinavian telecommunication company Telenor recently introduced the notion of Workfulness by adapting digital detox to the workplace. Workfulness is a management program aimed at technology-intensive companies that rely strongly on digital media. The program encompasses strategies of disconnection for employees, including mobile and email-free work hours and technology-free meetings, in order to enhance focus and efficiency. This article investigates Workfulness as one prominent example of managerial approaches that are based on neuroscientific assumptions about human decision-making. Drawing on textual materials and interviews, the analysis shows that Workfulness manages digital distractions in the workplace by establishing a form of stimulus-control rather than appealing to rational self-control. Workfulness alludes to the necessity of making choices, but it considers unconscious behavior, which is explained with reference to preconscious workings of the brain. The human brain becomes a battleground between rational and impulsive decisions, and it is the disobedient brain that needs to be governed in order to become an efficient employee. We situate the Workfulness program as part of and at the same time extending the biopolitical economy by incorporating advances in neurosciences into modes of governance.     

Distribution and denomination in Papua New Guinea: a field method and its results

ABSTRACT

In highland Papua New Guinea wealth distribution after a windfall is typically concealed by the donor. This trend was made easier by the introduction of state-issued currency, such that wealth reckoning and especially distribution preferences are often shrouded in mystery. The researcher set out to learn how denomination structures those money transfers by employing a semi-structured interview method centered around hypothetical distributions based on everyday encounters. Across four tailored ‘scenarios,’ fifteen Papua New Guinean participants dwelt on who to give money to, why, and under what conditions. Observations are made about the driving forces in distribution practices, the pecuniary conception of certain relationships’ importance, and relationships that turn on local conceptions of how to capitalize on the way money operates, thus demonstrating the utility of a culturally sensitive quantitative methodology.     

The moral economy of face: marketized gift and depoliticized solidarity in South Korea’s fair trade

ABSTRACT

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.     

Slumdog Millionaire Meets “India Shining”: (Trans)national Narrations of Identity in South Asian Diaspora

Abstract

This study uses the filmic text Slumdog Millionaire to examine how the tension between the nation and the transnational was communicated within South Asian diaspora. Findings from the textual analysis of commentary in the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times of India show that identity is articulated in purist as well as hybrid ways among South Asian diasporans. A lack of comfortable fit between cultural identity and place is evident. The analysis also shows that diasporic identity, hybridity, nation-state, and transnational forces work in particular configurations to raise consciousness about subaltern oppressions and exclusions within multiscalar operations of power and representation in globalizing conditions. Implications for intercultural communication and transitions are discussed.     

Shadow banking: a story of the Doppelgänger (the Double) in science of finance

ABSTRACT

After the 2007 financial crisis central bank economists in the US produced a map of shadow banking system, a fragile interconnectedness of regulated and unregulated financial institutions, to explain why the crisis had happened. This piece of cartographic work in banking regulation had two aims: (a) to represent the economic reality, including the parts that were not in regulatory sight, with full realism and (b) to develop a regulatory surveillance regime to monitor shadow banking to prevent future crises. This paper problematises the first aim as a peculiar cognitive response to the knowledge crisis of economics which challenges the consensus on modern finance as post-modern Baudrilliardian simulacra. The paper then introduces a cultural economy perspective to explore the regulatory fear in the second aim of the shadow banking analysis with references to the theme of the Doppelgänger (the Double) in the genre of horror stories. Finally the societal consequences of the control oriented epistemological choices of the shadow banking analysis are problematised by using Michel Serres concepts of foedera natura versus foedera fati.     

Best of both worlds or refusal to comply? The rich kids of Tehran on Instagram

ABSTRACT

This article offers a textual analysis and semiotic reading of the Rich Kids of Tehran's (RKOT’s) Instagram page. Contributing to scholarship on Iranian youth media practices, this article interrogates how the RKOT navigate urban and rural space to engage in everyday processes of resistance against global and local systemic oppression. Grounding their visual representations on Instagram in historical and cultural context, the author questions how and when quotidian actions are transformed into political transgressions when posted on social media. This article emphasizes the RKOT's agency in shaping their brand by analyzing representations of gender performance, intertextuality, and national identity on Instagram.     

Digital householding: calculating and moralizing domestic life through homemade spreadsheets

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among young heterosexual middle-class couples living together in Warsaw and its suburbs, this article explores the role of their homemade accounting and budgeting spreadsheets in the manufacture of domestic economic life. We argue that such digital forms actively intervene in the representation, constitution, shaping, and performing of their respective households as calculative agencies and moralized domains. We present and analyse a case study of five couple's householding with software, and based on that analysis call for an extension of the current interest in the generative role of financial devices from markets to households.