Meaning matters. An empirical analysis into public denotations of the label ‘strangers’ and their relationship with general ethnic prejudice

Survey research on ethnic prejudice often relies on statements focusing on generic labels such as ‘immigrants’, ‘strangers’, or ‘foreigners’. In this paper we argue that there are, however, good reasons to expect certain heterogeneity in the denotations respondents assign to these labels, and that the specific group respondents think of matters with respect to their response. We tested this assumption by using survey data from Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, N = 1375) that includes an open-ended question asking respondents which groups they associate with the label ‘strangers’ (Dutch: ‘vreemdelingen’). Content analysis revealed that the ten different meanings people in Flanders give to this label can be organized into four main groups concerning the content of the criterion (nationality, culture, race, no answer/refusal) and two ways concerning how the criterion is used (strangers defined as ‘them’ versus ‘not us’). Regression analyses subsequently showed systematic differences in general ethnic prejudice depending on the meaning of strangers, with people in Flanders who associate strangers with Muslims or people from predominantly Muslim countries reporting the highest level of prejudice. Finally, our data suggests that that the group people in Flanders associate with the label stranger varies according to respondents' socio-demographic background. Not taking into account these different meanings of strangers might lead to an underestimation of the social differences in ethnic prejudice.     

Enchanted Modernity,Anglicanism and the Occult in Early Twentieth-Century Oxford: Annie Moberly,Eleanor Jourdain and their ‘Adventure’

In August 1901, two respectable, unmarried Edwardian ladies travelled backwards in time. On a sightseeing trip to the Court of Versailles, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were transported back to 1792 where they encountered the soon-to-be-executed Queen Marie Antoinette. In 1911 they recounted their experiences in An Adventure, a book that was widely reviewed and ran to many editions. Throughout these episodes and their telling Moberly and Jourdain held the positions of Principal and Vice Principal of St Hugh’s Hall, one of Oxford’s newly established colleges for women. Later historians and members of St Hugh’s tended to dismiss them as ‘potty’ or attempted to protect their reputations as pioneers of women’s education from (what was subsequently perceived to be) the embarrassment of An Adventure. This article revisits Moberly and Jourdain’s “Adventure”, historicising rather than pathologising or seeking to explain it away. Alongside the sceptical responses, there were many who believed Moberly and Jourdain, and the two women did not lose social or professional standing as a result of telling their story. In trying to understand why this should have been the case, the article draws upon two bodies of recent scholarship. Firstly, it examines An Adventure in light of work that has rejected older formulations of modernity as necessarily ‘disenchanted’, and instead argues for the blurring of boundaries between occult and scientific discourses. In many ways, the case of An Adventure exemplifies and furthers this thesis, showing how it was possible for two educated, professional, “modern” women to believe they had entered into “an act of memory” by Marie Antoinette that transported them backwards in time. Yet, while most scholarship interested in the relationship between modernity and enchantment focuses on the relationship between science and heterodox/occult religions, An Adventure brings another element to the discussion: orthodox Christianity, and the Anglican Church in particular. Moberly and Jourdain came from clerical families and were devout adherents of the Church of England. Their “Adventure” also, therefore, speaks to recent histories of Christianity in modern Britain, which have argued against an overly polarised and oppositional understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the occult, or Christianity and secular science, pointing to the churches’ capacity for adaptation and incorporation. The article traces the reception of An Adventure as a way to explore further the basis upon which such claims could be both made and judged as credible in a rapidly modernising early twentieth-century Oxford. While highlighting the interconnections between the occult, Anglicanism and secular/scientific scholarship, the article argues that people at the time nevertheless carefully policed the boundaries of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” belief systems, a process informed by both gender and class.     

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.     

Interracial Couples’ Conflict Styles on Educational Issues

This study reports results of a quantitative survey of interracial couples’ conflict styles on one specific issue—education. Interracial couples answered a slightly revised version of Putnam-Wilson's Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument to assess conflict styles in dealing with education. The paper has three research questions: Do men and women score differently on self-reported use of conflict styles when dealing with educational issues? Does age or race predict self-reported conflict style for husbands when they deal with educational issues? and Does age or race predict self-reported conflict style for wives dealing with educational issues? A difference on control emerged between husbands and wives, with the latter showing more control-oriented behavior compared to the former. Wives’ age and race were not related to control, non-confrontation, or solution. Husbands who are Asian or Latino were more likely to exercise control. Older husbands’ responses reflected that they were more likely to display solution-oriented behaviors over control-oriented ones.     

Travelling Without Risks? Itinerant Entertainers in the Duchy of Brabant and their Uses of Passports at the End of the Eighteenth Century

This article examines the uses of passports among itinerant entertainers travelling through the Duchy of Brabant. Making their living with public performances ranging from singing, making music, acting and puppetry to acrobatics and bear dancing, they travelled on a daily, weekly or monthly basis over short and long distances with their shows. Their high level of mobility met with multiple restrictions imposed by the authorities. Travellers with little or no means were often arrested for vagrancy or begging on the charge of having no fixed residence or a steady job. Passports could help itinerant entertainers preventing their possible arrest. This article addresses the question how ambulant entertainers made use of passports for their travels. To this end I used passport registers on the one hand and vagrancy files of arrested itinerant entertainers on the other hand. The passport registers (available for the cities of Brussels and Antwerp) provide insight into who applied for a passport. Meanwhile, the vagrancy files shed light on entertainers travelling without a passport or with invalid ones. As such, this body of sources provides us with an exceptional insight into the variety of uses of passports by itinerant entertainers in Brabant at the turn of the century.     

Rethinking social movements through retranslating the economy

Abstract

This paper not only gives an overview of the transgender word in contemporary Japan but also attempts to illustrate the male to female cross‐dressing (MTFCD) community in Shinjuku, Tokyo, which plays an important role in the overall transgender world and how people in the community think and live, by conducting comprehensive fieldwork. The MTFCD community consists of amateur cross‐dressers and their patrons, and it is formed around about ten bars/clubs in Shinjuku. This community differentiates itself from the gay community in their customs and consciousness; they tend to recognize gender based on gender performance rather than biological sex, which is usually accepted for distinguishing sex. Therefore, a MTF cross‐dresser with feminine performance is considered as a ‘woman,’ regardless of one’s physical and biological conditions. Because of this recognition of gender based on gender performance, people in the community are able to develop the ‘quasi‐heterosexual’ relationships as men and ‘women.’     

To die a guest at home: on Oh my name,stand and walk on! A posthumous collection of the works of Nakaya Kōkichi

Nakaya Kokichi is a writer whose work illustrates a singular unfolding of intellectual thought in Okinawa under the US military occupation. This article sheds light on the political potential of Nakaya’s thoughts through a close reading of his posthumous collection. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the three aspects of his thought. First, Nakaya’s texts reveal the violent nature of “interpellation” that sustains the system of the US–Japan military alliance. Nakaya’s work exposes the way in which such interpellation at once subject those who live in Okinawa and, therefore, prohibits them from becoming political subjects. Second, Nakaya’s writings critique the politics of Okinawan nationalist identity and seek an alternative political future in the solidarity among non-subjectified bodies. Third, Nakaya’s thoughts suggest a paradoxical possibility of Kakushi, or a death in a foreign land even in one’s own so-call “homeland,” once that helps to resituate Okinawa as an intersection of “refugees,” who remain unable to belong to nation-states, and their “histories that open up laterally.”     

Wartime Holidays and the ‘Myth of the Blitz’

Published histories of the British home front during the Second World War, both academic and popular, say little or nothing about civilian holidays; the implication is that for most people they did not exist. This article disputes that reading. Complementing earlier work on officially sponsored ‘Holidays at Home’, the article first looks briefly at 1930s holiday expectations, then summarizes government measures to restrain ‘unnecessary’ wartime travel. Using rail-travel statistics, memoirs and diaries, contemporary novels, local press reports, Mass-Observation and other surveys it shows that throughout the war large numbers of people took holidays much as they had in peacetime. This apparent contradiction is then discussed in relation to, for instance, ideas of ‘normality’ and ‘wartime’, the survival of class in Britain, the wartime economy and the debate on the ‘myth of the blitz’ view of civilian behaviour.     

Passing on Political Information between Major Powers: The Key Role of Ambassadors between Byzantium and some of its Neighbours

Ambassadors and embassies were numerous between Byzantium and its Muslim and Western Christian neighbours during the Middle Byzantine Period. This article seeks to demonstrate that these official envoys constituted major players involved in the transfer of political information between the courts considered. Ambassadors were those who travelled the most in the Mediterranean area during our period – at least between 700 and 900. Furthermore, as official envoys acting for sovereigns, they were carefully listened to by those sovereigns when they returned. Information coming from ambassadors is found in various sources and concerned military matters and foreign policy. But we also find precise data on domestic affairs and internal political information. Furthermore, news of usurpations and troubles in Byzantium may have constituted an important part of the information transferred beyond the Empire. Foreign ambassadors witnessed usurpations and palace revolutions. Their testimonies could have nourished the idea of a Byzantine government weakened by political instability and this theme became prominent during the twelfth century in some Western Christian courts.     

“I Have a Voice”: Reexamining Researcher Positionality and Humanizing Research With African Immigrant Girls

This personal perspective piece examines the researcher’s positionality through the stance of humanizing research in multiethnic youth communities. Drawing on Paris and Paris and Winn’s notions on humanizing research, this article reexamines positionality by revisiting two subjectivities in a three-year qualitative case study with African immigrant girls. This reexamination considers the ways in which the research and the participants participated in dialogic consciousness-raising that were personal and interconnected. Overall, this personal essay analyzes the ways in which the researcher and the participants fostered relationships while transforming their communities to reflect and act upon the world around them. In doing so, they explored the humanizing nature of what it means to “have a voice” together.     

Reception of Stuart Hall in the Korean intellectual field

After Stuart Hall’s death in 2014, Korean newspapers ran detailed obituaries praising him as an influential British intellectual figure. The broad media attention appears to be unusual, given that he maintained a relatively unknown presence in the Korean cultural fields compared with other theorists. This work examines how and in which context Hall’s writings have been cited, or not cited, and emphasized in the Korean cultural studies. The incorporation of Hall’s writings into the resources of the academic field entangled him in scholarly rituals of parochial citations and applications, resulting in the fragmentation and de-contextualization of Hall’s overall problem. The selective focus on and occasional absence of certain aspects among his intellectual and political legacies may demonstrate how imported British cultural studies have, or not yet, been indigenized and localized in Korean cultural and political contexts.     

Rizal and the rethinking of the analytics of Malayness

This paper revisits Jose Rizal’s thoughts relevant to the Malays to extract insights and implications that may be useful in rethinking the parameters of the ongoing debates on Malayness. I argue that these terms need to be rethought because they restrict even the most well-intentioned scholarly efforts to unsettle the foundation of the ethnic or race-based politics that they seek to neutralize.     

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.     

Lesbians,Gay Men and The Production of Scale in East Germany

This article uses the concept of ‘scale’ to analyse the relative importance of local, national and global places, events, and explanatory frameworks in everyday lives in late communism. It uses a case study of lesbians and gay men living in East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and asks how these groups negotiated the restrictions of life under state socialism. It argues that both individuals and groups used scale in two ways: as an imaginative tool for making sense of the world, and as a political strategy for dealing with the state. In both cases, ‘scaling’, or choosing the scale at which one located oneself and one’s actions, was a means of disrupting and even contesting the rigid hierarchies of state socialist rule.     

Fear and Rumour in the People's Republic of China in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

The article explores the nature of popular fears during the early years of the People's Republic of China by examining two types of rumour: those of a ‘secular’ type that told of China's defeat in the Korean War, a third world war or an imminent nuclear attack; and those of a ‘supernatural’ type that told of demons out to snatch vital organs or the end of the world. These rumours testified both to the resilience of ancient cosmological beliefs and values and to their capacity to fuse with elements of ‘modern’ politics. The article asks what they tell us about the relationship of the party-state to the populace.     

Anti-Market Research: Piracy,New Media Metrics,and Commodity Communities

Over a decade after Napster’s introduction, file sharing programs still shoulder much of the blame for music and other media’s declining sales. Although labels and industry associations point their fingers at the harm digital piracy and file-sharing cause, they are less likely to admit the extent to which these anti-markets inform everyday decisions. File-sharing technologies create networks of users that serve as profitable data for ratings and metrics agencies. Using a case study of BigChampagne and its relationship to Napster, this article considers how the look, structure, and function of file-sharing software helped turn an economically threatening community into a commodity and how piracy’s disruptive potential is always in tension with processes of commodification.     

Beyond the Rule of Thumb: The Materiality of Marital Violence in England c. 1700–1857

This article examines how marital violence was articulated in and around particular places, spaces, and objects, to reveal the tensions embedded in the physical structure of the household and its control. It also demonstrates that space and objects shaped marital violence both as an idea and an act and did ‘emotional work’ in the sense that they operated upon people’s emotions and behaviour. Finally, it argues that an imagined material culture of marital violence contributed to the construction and maintenance of class stereotypes.     

In between home and homeland: Diaspora identity as a cultural hybrid in Mohsen Namjoo’s “Cielito Lindo”

ABSTRACT

Rather than resisting either new or old culture, Iranian musicians in the diaspora embrace both their new host environments and their native homeland, as they create a place between cultural assimilation and preservation, helping to shape new sounds of exile. This essay explores how Iranian musicians embrace the new and the familiar, the traditional and the popular, creating an original cultural hybrid. Questions of cultural identity and the politics of location and displacement are addressed using a theoretical cultural studies framework, incorporating themes of personal and collective nostalgia. This discussion is supplemented by documented narrative experiences from Iranian musicians and artists. Furthermore, the textual and musical analysis of singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo’s readaptation of the familiar Mexican ranchera song “Cielito Lindo” uncovers unique nuances and layers of meaning that not only shed light on one musician’s personal journey to exile, but also speak to a greater collective experience of Iranians today who continue to be torn between home and homeland.     

Insulting Jean Massieu: Debating Representational Control of Deaf People in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain

In 1876, an educator of the deaf and a ‘deaf-mute’ publicly clashed over topics ranging from the nature of deafness and the identity of those who are ‘deaf-mute’ to the best methods to be used in deaf education and what deaf children following those methods might be expected to achieve. The debate occurred at a point in the nineteenth century when expert authority ‘about’ deaf people was beginning to sweep away deaf people’s own right to self-representation. Although richly nuanced and highly personal, the debate’s occurrence at a period that studies of the history of the deaf community have identified as pivotal to deaf people’s categorisation as ‘disabled’ means that much of its complexity has been lost in subsequent historical over-writing. This article explores the debate in depth. It provides a valuable glimpse into the mechanisms of expertise, and the ways that both non-deaf and deaf experts understood who deaf people were, what they could do, and what their place within society should be at that pivotal time. It also highlights the rich complexity of a much more complex history available to those prepared to dig beneath the surface to expose historical texture.     

Trees and umbrellas: a parallel reading of the Istanbul Gezi Park Movement and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

This paper makes a parallel reading of two recent urban protest movements: the 2013 Istanbul Gezi Park Movement (GPM) and the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (UM). As regional centers at both ends of Asia, Istanbul and Hong Kong might at f?rst sight appear to be incongruent cities for comparison. Istanbul’s recent past has been defined by contrasting opinions about the city’s post-imperial identity, while Hong Kong’s recent past has been shaped by competing visions around the city’s post-colonial status. Directing attention to the striking parallels between the GPM and UM in terms of the nature of the events themselves, the profile of the participants and opponents, the government response that they received, and the cultural sensitivities concerning the questions of belonging and identity that they rekindled, the paper argues that comparative studies of the new urban protest movements would provide significant insights for discerning the dynamics of emerging illiberal democracies across the world.