Once a refugee: selfie activism,visualized citizenship and the space of appearance

ABSTRACT

This article examines the social media campaign “Once I was a refugee” by former refugees as a response to the increasingly hostile political climate in Finland against refugees. With selfie activism, the campaign expanded the “space of appearance” and introduced new voice and visuality to the public debate. The case depicts politics of claiming citizenship and social value through self-presentation to counter views of refugees as economic burden, noncitizens, and surplus humanity. The empirical material is based on analysis of the Facebook and Twitter campaign and interviews with the participants. It is argued that selfie activism may occasionally, through new voice and visibility, expand the space of appearance and contribute to the rise of affective or counter-publics that can come together and make use of digital media for political action. However, the case also reveals how difficult it is to speak from a refugee position without being drawn into the discourse of deservingness.     

Complicating cosmopolitanism: Ethno-cultural and sexual connections among gay migrants

ABSTRACT

Contemporary migrants are described as “connected migrants,” as they maintain multiple connections using digital and social media. This article explores how this leads to processes of cosmopolitanism and/or encapsulation in a particular group, voluntary gay migrants in Belgium, focusing on the intersection between ethno-cultural and sexual identifications and connections. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the cosmopolitan outlook of the participants becomes clear, as their national and ethno-cultural connections are relatively weak while they identify more strongly with cosmopolitan LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) culture. However, while more salient, sexuality is not all-defining either, bespeaking their rather privileged position as a group of migrants who are self dependent and not strongly encapsulated in ethno-cultural nor sexual communities, with neither minority identity causing excessive stigmatization. As a consequence, they use digital and social media to simultaneously connect to different social spheres, although most do manage their self-presentation to avoid the clash or “collapse” of different social contexts online.     

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.     

Bad feelings,feeling bad: the affects of Asian-Indigenous coalition

ABSTRACT

This article theorizes the affective forms that Asian-Indigenous alliances might take, using examples from contemporary Canadian film and literature as a cultural testing ground. Building on the efforts of scholars like Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Malissa Phung to trace a literary genealogy of Asian-Indigenous relations in Canada, the article first considers the structures of feeling which bolster efforts towards coalition-building between Asian settlers and First Nations. Rather than extending an optimistic or redemptive model, the article suggests that negative affect (or, what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings”) ought to be taken seriously as both an unavoidable presence and a potential catalyst in and for active solidarity. The article then analyzes Sto:lo author Lee Maracle’s short story “Yin Chin” and Peter Blow’s documentary film A Village of Widows with an eye towards how bad feelings underpin the narrative calls to action in both texts. The article concludes by considering the role that bad feeling can and does play in terms of inter-referencing practices among cultural and historical scholars.     

The coming crisis of cultural engagement? Measurement,methods, and the nuances of niche activities

ABSTRACT

Do ticketing data and national survey data on attendance tell the same story? This question is particularly important in the context of debates over the power of new forms of data to supplant the “traditional” survey methods that have underpinned our understanding of the social stratification of culture. This paper compares three data sources on attendance: the Active Lives Survey, the Taking Part Survey, and Audience Finder. We first compare self-reported attendance at events in each English local authority from the Active Lives survey with ticket sales data, finding a close relationship. We follow up by comparing the distributions of ticket buyers across the Indices of Multiple Deprivation with those from Taking Part, finding that for widely-ticketed and widely-attended art forms they track closely together, providing support for existing trends. Ticketing data does not seem to offer more information on social stratification than traditional social science sources. However, we extend the comparison through more detailed analysis of subcategories within less well-researched forms – literature and dance events – where numbers of attendees are lower, with accompanying uncertainty in survey sources. We find that the audiences for dance vary widely, with ballet attendance being heavily socially stratified but attendance at contemporary dance much more similar to the general population. However, we find that audiences for literature events are more heavily socially stratified than almost any other art form, almost regardless of the subcategory. The power of new datasets is in offering specificity about artforms, rather than overturning what we know about culture and inequality.     

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.     

“I will not hate myself because you cannot accept me”: Problematizing empowerment and gender-diverse selfies

ABSTRACT

While selfies of beautiful cisgender women are declaimed by mainstream media as narcissistic and facile, some body-positive feminists and queer theorists argue that selfies can be empowering. They claim self-representation by traditionally stigmatized people can challenge normative presentations of beauty and gender. This article problematizes “empowerment” as a definitive and/or productive frame and argues instead for observation and analysis of “privilege” in situated practice. In this article I combine analysis of a collection of online cultural artifacts (including nonbinary selfies on Tumblr) and interviews with a small group of trans* social media storytellers to explore theoretical tensions between gender fluidity and identity fragmentation across multiple social media sites and practices. Gender-diverse digital self-representation encompasses both “consistent” androgyny, nonbinary, agender, and so on, and “emergent” presentations-in-flux. I assert that the ongoing iteration of self across social media—implied by self (re)presentation—can have simultaneous and contradictory political significance. I conclude that networked interpersonal complications frame understandings of empowerment, as perhaps they always have done.     

Mediated absent presence in forced displacement

ABSTRACT

For many forcefully displaced people worldwide, notions around one’s sense of “home” and “place” in the world are perpetually unsettled. This article explores how digital technologies interact with embodied, material experiences within the geographical location refugees are residing in. Empirical examples from ethnographic research conducted among Iraqi urban refugees, living in prolonged uncertainty in Jordan, shows how situated experiences of legal, material, and social uncertainty reinforce particular mediated socialities. Pivotal studies have shown how digital connections engender virtual home-making practices and a wide variety of connected presences. This study points to the other side of the same coin: the cultivation of “absent presence.” “Absent presence” refers to feelings—the ambivalence that experiences of prolonged displacement bring about—but also to active disengagement and affective tactics in response. These engender a further separation from the physical world where forced migrants are not deemed welcome.     

Fats Waller Meets Harry Champion

ABSTRACT

Though left for dead in scholarly accounts, the inter-war music hall recovered from competition from the new entertainment forms of the 1920s to enjoy a greatly revived popularity in the 1930s. A comparative analysis of the repertoire and performance of two major stars of the 1930s, one American, one British, reconstructs the contemporary popular aesthetic of pleasure and sexuality. It assesses the impact of American styles, and the prominent position of the halls in a quickening debate over the people's pleasures and their place in national identity, at a time of international crisis and shifting social mores.     

Bandung Lautan Hardcore: territorialisation and deterritorialisation in an Indonesian hardcore punk scene

Abstract

This article explores the entangled and contradictory processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation that have shaped the hardcore punk scene in Bandung, Indonesia, while questioning the binary model of globalisation and localisation. The formation of the Bandung scene has certainly involved processes of local adaptation, translation, and territorialisation, but these cannot be disentangled from the global styles, orientations, and networks associated with hardcore punk. Through their active participation in global hardcore, Bandung's punks adopt a standpoint of underground cosmopolitanism that goes beyond a merely mimetic relationship to Western scenes. Their valorisation of local “Do It Yourself” production and performance reflects the value practices of global hardcore punk, and the social relationships that constitute the local scene extend beyond any straightforwardly spatial definition of the “local.” At the same time, this global orientation takes on particular locally-inflected meanings in the specific cultural and political environment of Bandung, Indonesia.     

Coptic Language and Identity in Ayyūbid Egypt1

Abstract

In the late Fā?imid and Ayyūbid periods of Egyptian history, Coptic Christians finally addressed the reality that most of their community no longer understood the Coptic language but were, in fact, losing their communal identity and “figures of memory” to Arabisation and even Islamisation. A Coptic-Arabic “Renaissance” ensued whereby Coptic liturgy, theology and history were translated into Arabic, the lingua franca by this time of the Coptic populace. This creative energy extended into the artistic realm – such as iconography and painting – and ultimately strengthened the identity of the Coptic community as their situation became increasingly more restricted.     

Reclaiming America: the quest for home in Shawn Wong’s Homebase

ABSTRACT

With its dynamic narrative, Shawn Wong's Homebase recounts the story of four generations of a Chinese family searching for a homebase on the land of the United States. Personal experiences, family chronicles, and Chinese American history are portrayed through various forms, including short stories, correspondences, student essays, memories, and dreams. A major theme of the novel is geographically and spiritually “reclaiming America,” or attempts by Chinese Americans to make the United States their “real” home. The protagonist's way to reclaim America involves revisiting landmarks and other places in the United States where his father and grandfather had traveled, through which he tries to discover the meaning of his own life in the United States and thereby to find his personal identity and home in this country. In drawing the topography of Chinese American history, Shawn Wong not only inscribed Chinese American presence on those places where the protagonist's forefathers had lived and worked, but also used legends to implant their heritage into those soils. Shawn Wong hopes that through his writing he can build for Chinese Americans a history, a cultural foundation with myths and legends of their own. Only when a people's myths spread over the land they inhabit can the land truly be considered theirs. The Chinese American identity shaped in Homebase is heroism, rooted in the ethnic identity of the male Chinese American in the American West, and this is the “home” that the protagonist as well as many other Chinese Americans ever quest for.     

Beyond the crisis: the “chaotic formula” of Hong Kong cinema

Abstract

Hong Kong's film industry has been living through and beyond the 1997 handover to China. Along a complicated socio-economic and cultural heritage, the city's “crisis cinema” successfully milked takeover fears for an anarchic display of showmanship. Local filmmaking conditions, popular narratives and aesthetics from that time can be identified as ingredients in a “chaotic formula” that instigated Hong Kong cinema's “Golden Age.” Unlike other film industries, which point to their disaster centres in a search or celebration of national identity, Hong Kong survived at a fragile historic juncture largely by sailing around the cliffs of political affront and resorting to metaphorical speech instead. Yet, following the handover, the film industry has retired its previous attitudes about itself and the future; it has integrated a new “China factor” and riddled cinema with contradictory statements about the “condition” of Hong Kong. System failure, madness and identity theft in crime stories appear alongside celebratory historicism, cultural allegiance and escapist spectacle, especially in Hong Kong-China co-productions. This paper follows the evolution of the crime genre along general dynamics and transformations of the formula from the 1980s, past the turbulent 1990s and into recent postcolonial Hong Kong, in which the inability to formulate a new crisis, or the resolution of the previous one, has put cinema itself into crisis.     

Same-sex intimacies in Syariffudin's Mairil and the queering of authenticity

ABSTRACT

The rise in LGBT-themed novels in Indonesia over the last decade demonstrates the sea-change in social attitudes and the public presence of sexual and gender minorities in Indonesia. The genre emerges from the popularity of sexually-charged novels by female authors such as Ayu Utami and Djenar Maesa Ayu. However, many novels were criticised for the supposed westernisation of Indonesian culture that threatens the national identity and moral disposition of its readers. This article explores the underlying themes of these criticisms—nationhood, cultural authenticity, and morality—and juxtaposes them with the claims of cultural authenticity and legitimacy made by gay and lesbi Indonesians. Representations of “traditional” homoeroticisms in the novel Mairil by Syarifuddin bring these lines of arguments together and synthesise a discursive space where cultural and national authenticities are “queered.” It is my contention that religious and traditional elements that foster same-sex practices offer a key to queer legitimacy for Indonesian sexual minorities.     

Darts in England, 1900–39: A Social History. By Patrick Chaplin

ABSTRACT

This article examines the status and meanings of heterosexual love in post-war Britain. It is situated within the burgeoning field of the history of emotion and draws upon recent work on interiority and modern selfhood. It argues that love became a central plank in the quest for self-actualization in this period. It explains why love triumphed over pragmatism in the remaking of British matrimony and how this impacted upon the institution of marriage itself. The article posits the immediate post-war years as a time of significant discursive change and emotional instability: expectations rose and critical introspection deepened. The ways in which love was fashioned in the 1940s and 1950s were central to the dramatic social and cultural changes that occurred in the decades that followed.     

Caught between empire and occupation: censorship,deimperialization, and Koreans in postwar Japan

ABSTRACT

The collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945 plunged East Asia into a state of flux and upheaval, making necessary the redrawing of geopolitical borders and the redefining the “boundaries” of nationality, language, and legal status. As part of this broader process, Koreans in occupied postwar Japan, via the platform of the magazine Democratic Korea (Minshu Chōsen), advocated for a joint process of decolonization and deimperialization whereby both Koreans and Japanese could construct a society free of imperial hierarchies. U.S. Military Occupation policy and censorship, however, thwarted these efforts and disallowed the possibility for the inclusion of a Korean subjectivity within the space of the Japanese nation. Facing intense political pressure, Koreans in Japan started to shift toward a “non-national” Zainichi Korean subjectivity distinct from the two Korean-nation states established in 1948. Further, through analyzing the case of Koreans in occupied Japan, this article sheds light on the broader impact of occupation censorship on postwar Japanese society and how the post-imperial transition to a nation-state model was a tumultuous one.     

Musical discovery,colonialism, and the possibilities of intercultural communication through music

ABSTRACT

Discourses of discovery have been important in a wide range of musical contexts, from early modern ideas about musical composition through to current forms of popular music production and consumption. Across these various contexts there are often inherent connections between discovery and colonialism, connections that become most apparent in non-Western socio-cultural and musical settings. In this article, I situate discourses of discovery within the “coloniality of power,” noting how colonial discovery can be more critically described as invention. From here, I turn to the genre of World Music as an example of how musical discovery is underpinned by inherently colonial perspectives, articulations of power, and relationships of dominance and subordination between Western and non-Western cultures. In contrast, I present the concept of interculturalism as a way of thinking about the possibilities of cultural in-between-ness beyond discovery, drawing on the practices of musicians who articulate intercorporeal and intercultural communication through performance.     

Depoliticized politics,multiple components of hegemony,and the eclipse of the Sixties

Abstract

Following the recent trends of globalization and regionalization, the idea of Asia has been revived in political, economic, and cultural fields. This essay examines some of the various uses of this idea in modern East Asian and especially Chinese history. The essay consists of four parts. Part One discusses the derivativeness of the idea of Asia, that is, how this idea developed from modern European history, especially the nineteenth century European narrative of “World History,” and it points out how the early modern Japanese “theory of shedding Asia” derived from this narrative. Part Two studies the relationship between the idea of Asia and two forms of Narodism against the background of the Chinese and Russian revolutions – one, exemplified by Russian Narodism, attempted to use Asian particularity to challenge modern capitalism; the other, represented by Sun Yat‐sen, attempted to construct a nation‐state according to a socialist revolutionary program, and to develop agricultural capitalism under the particular social conditions of Asia. Part Three considers the differences and tensions between the “Great Asia‐ism” of Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun and the Japanese idea of Toyo (East Asia), and it discusses the need to overcome the categories of nation‐state and international relations in order to understand the question of Asia. Part Four discusses the need to go beyond early modern maritime‐centered accounts, nationalist frameworks, and Eurocentrism in re‐examining the question of Asia through historical research by focusing on the particular legacies of Asia (such as the tributary system) and the problems of “early modernity.”     

Same or different? The “cultural entrepreneurship” and “arts entrepreneurship” constructs in European and US higher education

“Arts entrepreneurship” is beginning to emerge from its infancy as a field of study in US higher education institutions. “Cultural Entrepreneurship”, especially as conceived of in European contexts, developed earlier and on a somewhat different but parallel track. As Kuhlke, Schramme, and Kooyman [(2015). Introduction. Creating cultural capital: Cultural entrepreneurship in theory, pedagogy and practice. Delft: Eburon] note, “In Europe, courses began to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s?…?primarily providing an established business school education with an industry-specific focus on the new and emerging creative economy.” Conversely, the development of “arts entrepreneurship” courses and programmes in the US have been driven as much or more from interest within arts disciplines or even from within the career services units of arts conservatories as a means toward supporting artist self-sufficiency and career self-management. This paper looks at the conceptual development of “arts entrepreneurship” in the US as differentiated from “cultural entrepreneurship” in Europe and elsewhere. Its intention is to uncover where the two strands of education (and research) are the same, and where they are different. In addition to a review of existing literature on European cultural entrepreneurship, US data is drawn from a new survey and inventory of US arts entrepreneurship programmes developed for the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru).     

Expecting penises in Chatroulette: Race,gender, and sexuality in anonymous online spaces

ABSTRACT

As a femme woman of color, I employ critical autoethnography based on my participant observation within Chatroulette for a qualitative study on how online impressions through web cameras with strangers are formed in quick bursts of time. Chatroulette’s anonymity adds interesting context for impression creation in an online environment that emphasizes ocularcentrism of the embodied self. This article adds to methodologies of self-care for the qualitative researcher by positioning the issue of self-care in the online field, where “regular” interactions based on race, gender, sexuality, and more may leave autoethnographers from marginalized communities especially vulnerable. This study complicates the conceptual boundaries of “audience,” “participation,” and “observation” for online autoethnographic research. This research contributes to impression formation theory by focusing on the importance of the body in immediate, one-time impression constructions with conversational partners online. Race, gender, and sexuality impact online communication, even when a word is not even said.