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.     

‘Facing’ Identity in a ‘Faceless’ Society: Physiognomy,Facial Appearance and Identity Perception in Eighteenth-Century London

English men and women confronted many new questions about the relationship between identity and appearance during the eighteenth century. How did the face reveal information about a person’s character, morality, health, class, gender, nationality and race? How should faces be perceived in forms of social interaction? Could appearances be trusted? Through analysis of physiognomic texts, urban literature, aesthetic treatises, conduct books and cosmetic manuals, this article examines the changing social and cultural meanings attached to the face, and developments in the ways contemporary authors advised it should be ‘read’ as a signifier of character, identity and social difference in eighteenth-century London.     

English Proficiency,Identity, Anxiety,and Intergroup Attitudes: US Americans’ Perceptions of Chinese

Guided by the Common Ingroup Identity Model and Berry’s acculturation framework, this study examined the roles that perceptions of language proficiency, cultural identity, and communication anxiety had on intergroup attitudes and stereotypes in the American–Chinese contact context. Serial mediation analyses with 10,000 bootstrap samples revealed that perceived English proficiency of a Chinese contact had significant indirect effects on affective and behavioral attitudes toward Chinese through American participants’ perceptions of their contact’s host and home culture identification and communication anxiety. Perceived English proficiency had an indirect effect only on positive stereotypes through the Chinese contact’s perceived identification with home culture.     

“A living archive of modern protest”: Memory-making in the Women’s March

ABSTRACT

The Women’s March, held on January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States, made news across the world as a surprisingly powerful current event that signaled possible political and social futures. Yet this event was also threaded with the past. This essay examines the uses and constructions of memory in the marches and their mediation, drawing on news and social media coverage, on my own on-site experience at the Washington, DC, march, and interdisciplinary scholarship that may provide theoretical context for understanding the event’s nature and lasting importance. It considers the rhetorical and material memory work, on the ground, of both the official ceremonies and the marchers’ more vernacular expressions, as well as the complex interplay of mediation, resulting in definitions of the event as historic in its own right and as a map for the future.     

‘We want everybody’s salvage!’: Recycling,Voluntarism, and the People’s War

ABSTRACT

This article reveals the role of volunteers in the British government’s campaign to increase recycling during the Second World War. It uses their experience to deconstuct the idea of a 'people's war', showing how this concept was invoked in several different ways. The article demonstrates that voluntary recycling schemes were led from the bottom-up, shifted the balance of power between private citizens and local authorities, and highlighted difference based on age, socio-economic status, gender, and geographical location. It concludes that official appeals may have invoked the ‘people’s war’, but the way that these messages were received was of most importance.     

Political aesthetics: activism,everyday life,and art’s object in 1960s’ Japan

Abstract

Around 1960, revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge administrative forms of politics and daily life. In Japan, despite massive strikes and widespread protest, the ruling party used a Diet majority and riot police to renew the USA–Japan Security Treaty. After this display of force, this party’s new administration sought a new legitimacy, and a means to assuage and co‐opt the defeated opposition, through promoting a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, and a dehistoricized national image in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Among those activists who emerged to contest this new cultural politics, a diverse group of young artists worked to repoliticize daily life through an interventionist art practice. Their practices arose out of a particular local, playful art practice, whose focus on the material debris and spaces of the economic expansion led to an engagement with the transformations of daily life. Focusing on the art practices connected with the yearly exhibition, the Yomiuri Indépendant, I examine the advent of a critical art examining the everyday world of Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflecting on its complex relation with an internationalized art world and domestic art scene, mass culture, and domestic protest movements. Examining the history of this art illuminates the state’s investments in a normative cultural order, and a particular configuration of the politics of culture in the early 1960s.     

‘A Million Little Bonds’: Infidelity,Divorce and the Emotional Worlds of Marriage in British Women’s Magazines of the 1930s

This article examines infidelity discourse within women's magazines of the 1930s. Marking a departure from existing studies that have explored representations of ideal marriage, it uses discussions of marital breakdown as a lens through which to consider conceptualisations of love within marriage. It demonstrates how, in the interwar period, notions of mutual emotional investment were used to reinforce marriages that were deemed to be in breakdown. Muddying the perceived binary between individuals and the institution of marriage, this research highlights how the latter could be bolstered, rather than challenged, by recourse to the emotional worlds of spouses.     

The Breasts of Virgins: Sexual Reputation and Young Women’s Bodies in Medieval Culture and Society

Many medical texts of the European Middle Ages included advice to young women on breast reduction. These recipes and techniques have not often been discussed by medieval historians, whose interest in meanings of women’s breasts has concentrated mostly on religious or nutritive associations. Highlighting late medieval English texts and culture, this article summarises medical advice on repressing breast growth, notes some ancient and earlier medieval precedents and argues the recipes responded not only to aesthetic preferences but also to beliefs that bust size and texture signified sexual experience. Arguing that breasts were legible flesh, in which an observer could read a young woman’s honour, it contends that breast suppression not only met idealised beauty standards but also protected sexual reputations.     

“Honorable Piracy” and Chile’s Digital Transition

This article examines debates around Chile’s digital television transition in order to trace the socio-historical relation between piracy and social change. During the military dictatorship (1973–1990), media activists used what they called “honorable piracy” for counter-communication efforts aimed at restoring democracy. Following the return to democracy, community television participants have rationalized their unauthorized transmission of alternative programming to low-income sectors using a similar logic of honorable piracy. For these community television participants, the digital transition represented the possibility of redefining democratic access to the public sphere and attaining legal recognition. Through an analysis of citizen activism around the move from analog to digital television, this article argues that discussion of piracy emerges as an expression of conflicting notions of the definition, use, and distribution of public resources.     

Mental illness,late capitalism,and the socioeconomic “psychopath” in CBS’s Elementary

This article focuses on representations of mental illness on U.S. network television, particularly the “police procedural” Elementary. As a modern interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes character, Elementary is unique in emphasizing the detective’s struggles with drug addiction and mental illness, as well as a long road of recovery where intellectual labor is instrumental and “therapeutic” (rather than stressful and alienating). Despite its critical acclaim, Elementary’s progressive portrayals of symptoms of mental illness in Holmes are complicated by the series’s stereotypical depiction of villains that are “mad men,” “lunatics,” and “psychopaths” driven by financial gain and individual greed. The “acceptability” of mental illness in the series is measured by a character’s compliance with the dominant social order. While Elementary provides some positive messages about mental illness, its socioeconomic commentaries individualize “madness,” violence, and the pitfalls of late capitalism to support an increasingly problematic narrative of neoliberalism and mental health.     

“Thank You for Calling:” Accents and Authenticity on NBC’s Outsourced

India’s turbulent and dynamic relationship with the English language stems from its colonial past. This project integrates linguistic hegemony, mimicry, and brown voice to examine discourses surrounding the creation and reception of fake Indian accents on the short-lived NBC series Outsourced. The first primetime sitcom to showcase a primarily South Asian cast, Outsourced featured British and American actors of Indian descent using fake Indian accents to portray call center workers. Critical Discourse Analysis reveals the influence of linguistic hegemony to delegitimize Indian English and thereby hinder linguistic cosmopolitanism.     

Kim Ki Duk’s promise,Zanussi’s betrayal: film festival,world cinema and the subject of the region

This paper, focusing on the short film, Dear Kim (2009), and a debate between Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi and Marxist intellectual P. Govinda Pillai at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in 1998, attempts to understand the work done by the category of “world cinema” and the institution of the film festival in the formation of the subject of the region, in this case the south Indian state of Kerala. It focuses on the linguistic region formed in post-independence India, thought of as either mirroring or resisting the nation, and as a cultural resource necessary to inhabit the nation as a citizen. The paper argues for a conception of the subject of the region that is performative, where it negotiates multiple horizons of universality simultaneously. While the figure of the citizen provides it with one horizon of universality, the subject is not exhausted by it. In the case of Kerala, through the figuration of a conception of “world,” operationalized through the conduit of “world cinema,” often located in the institutional space of the film festival, the subject is able to access other horizons of universality, enabling it to transcend the particularities that a politics of location imposes on it.     

Being a Man,Being a Member: Masculinity and Community in Britain’s Working Men’s Clubs, 1945–1960*

By 1960, there were more than 3,500 working men’s clubs in Britain, with a combined membership of more than two million people. This article explores their post-war transformation from small homosocial enclaves for drinking and bar-games to larger family-oriented entertainment venues, while they continued to provide social, welfare and educational activities for local communities. Operating on the boundaries of public and private life, they remained alternative sites of domesticity to the home, in which men nurtured relations with both friends and family. Nevertheless, though women and children came to represent a significant presence in the clubs, their cultures remained largely patriarchal and discriminatory. I argue that working men’s clubs provided important sources of agency, community and continuity for their members, during a period of rapid social and cultural change.     

David Underdown’s Revel,Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660

Abstract

This article examines the strategies and tactics of surveillance that were used by Manchester City Police in relation to anxieties about gender, sexuality, juvenile delinquency and drugs misuse in post-war England. In the early 1960s the members-only ‘coffee beat club’ became a target of police activity, resulting in a series of raids, minor prosecutions and the intensification of the licensing laws. Commenting on the relationship between police culture and youth culture, including the leisure practices of adolescent girls, this article argues that the targeting of the ‘coffee beat club’ became a motif for the defence of an older imagined social order.     

Indonesia’s original sin: mass killings and capitalist expansion, 1965–66

Following an aborted coup attempt in October 1965, the Indonesian military organized what turned out to be one of the most horrifying massacres of the twentieth century. More than half a million people were killed while hundreds of thousands of others were detained for years in prison camps throughout the country. There are two major points that this paper attempts to make. First, that the killings are in fact a case of state violence despite of the efforts to make it look like spontaneous violence. Second, that the killings are crucial to the expansion of capitalism in Indonesia. Using Marx’s concept of ‘primitive accumulation’, it attempts to show that the mass killings and arrests, the expropriation of people from their houses and lands, and the elimination of working‐class political formations, are integral parts of an economic strategy of the New Order.     

Performing Bandung: China’s dance diplomacy with India,Indonesia, and Burma, 1953–1962

While dance was a common element of international diplomacy activities around the world during the 1950s and early 1960s, scholars have only recently begun to focus attention on this topic, especially as it concerns relationships forged beyond those of the Cold War superpowers. Using previously unexamined historical materials such as rare photographs and performance programs, dancer biographies, autobiographies and personal interviews, unpublished institutional histories, and contemporary periodicals, this article demonstrates not only that dance was an integral part of China’s inter-Asian cultural exchange between 1953 and 1962, but also that the PRC developed a distinct approach to dance diplomacy. Through a series of exchanges with India, Indonesia and Burma, China’s foreign ministers and dancers developed and refined a method of dance diplomacy in which the primary goal was to learn from, rather than export to, these neighboring countries. This approach harnessed the affective power of embodied aesthetic culture to literally “perform” Bandung ideals, namely, cooperation and mutual respect among Asian nations and an anti-imperialist cultural stance. Through the establishment in 1962 of the Oriental Song and Dance Ensemble, the PRC institutionalized this model of dance diplomacy, expanding it to include the entire Third World. Bandung-era dance diplomacy initiatives of the 1950s and early 1960s not only supported important new international alliances and political movements, but also asserted China’s self-identity as part of the East in the way that challenged Eurocentric ideals previously entrenched in China’s domestic dance field.