Editorial introduction

The city-state of Hong Kong had a unique postcolonial birth in 1997, when it was handed over to the motherland, China, after the expiration of a hundred year lease on Hong Kong held by the British. In this paper, I suggest that Hong Kong's unique attainment of postcoloniality, and the evolution of her subsequent complicated relationship with Mainland China, leads to a deep sense of anxiety in Hong Kong's identity as a global city. This anxiety, I further argue, is mapped on to the physical landscape of Hong Kong. By analysing the portrayal of Tin Shui Wai, a marginal and isolated area of development in Hong Kong, and the contrasting depiction of public and private spaces in Ann Hui's 2009 film Night and Fog, I attempt to explore the Freudian “uncanny,” the return of the repressed, which constantly threatens to erupt. In the concluding section of the paper, I use Kristevian theories of abjection and the spatialization of identity to argue that the figure of Ling, the Mainland mother in Hui's film, brings to the fore Hong Kong's anxiety about its postcolonial identity and relationship with China. She epitomizes the othered self, the return of the repressed, the foreigner who must necessarily be expelled (through murder) from within the nation-space of Hong Kong.     

‘Its gait is too brisk:’ money mobility in Karachi’s foreign exchange market

ABSTRACT

The global spread of finance capitalism has ushered in a speculative nature of currency trade and has given rise to new forms of subjectivity. Narrowing the ethnographic gaze on a thirty-seven year old currency trader in Karachi, this paper advances two arguments. The first argument relates to the materiality of foreign exchange and their effects on traders’ bodies. In spot trading, the currency traders experience foreign currency as an affective quality breathing down heavily on the senses. The second argument points to an interconnected nature of foreign exchange markets. Using Knorr Cetina and Breugger's notion of ‘global microstructures,’ I demonstrate the ways in which a currency trader, operating in a post-9/11 counter-terrorist surveillance milieu in the country, negotiates the micro and global scales of economy. Grounded in ethnographic research in Pakistan, this paper explores the ways in which foreign currency, especially of the metropole, is circulated, exchanged, and imagined in a postcolonial context, and hence contributes to an emerging scholarship of anthropology of money and finance.     

World War Z,The Zombie Apocalypse,and the Israeli state’s monstering of Palestinian “others”

ABSTRACT

The authors deploy a critical cultural critique that extends the work of monstrosity scholars and other researchers who are interested in the application of zombie apocalypse analyses to critiques of contemporary nationalistic and social controversies. World War Z sets in motion a series of cinematic dynamics that invite audiences to consider how Israeli securitization of Jerusalem might serve as the world's best hope for containing the zombie apocalypse. By decoding the “monstering” features World War Z, the authors note the heuristic value of understanding how the rhetoric of autoimmunity influences mediated perceptions of Israeli and Palestinian conflicts.     

奴役与新生--从后殖民女性主义角度解读《宠儿》和《慈悲》中母亲形象

《宠儿》和《慈悲》是美国当代著名黑人女作家托妮·莫里森的代表作。莫里森从女性奴隶母亲的角度描写了奴隶的真实内部生活,揭示了掩盖黑人真正历史的沉重黑幕,唤起黑人群体正视历史,探索了非裔女性如何更好地确立自身的身份的途径。     

Reading an ethnology museum as pedagogical space: a multitext study

Ethnology museums have a troubled lineage as they are inheritors of a violent colonial legacy while being steeped in a positivist epistemology that seeks to order and categorize an otherwise disordered world. Educational research, similarly, is often predicated on realist knowledge principles as people are made objects to demonstrate their interactions to predict likely outcomes of various interventions. This article considers how an ethnology museum, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, can be used as a learning site by student teachers as they experience reading a museum. Student teachers, having considered examples of postcolonial theory, use this scholarship to think through and critically read AMNH. The inquiry into how student teachers read AMNH as a pedagogical space is reframed, however, by multitext interjections offered by participants themselves. The study, then, is oriented around two principal areas: how student teachers can read an ethnology museum critically and how multitexts may work to address representational problems inherent in social science research, such as education.     

Trading quality across borders: colonial discourse and international quality assurance policies in higher education

Accountability and quality assurance have become central discourses in higher education policy throughout the world. However, accountability and quality assurance involve power and control. Practices and ideas about quality developed in the Global North are spreading rapidly across the Global South, leading to increased uniformity in the approaches to quality assurance. Given the significant asymmetries that divide the Global North and Global South, this article maps interdiscursive relations among key texts that influence policy development on international quality in higher education, and explores the applicability of colonial discourse as a perspective for understanding this increasing international convergence.     

杂糅--对《耻》的后殖民解读

后殖民文学是对欧洲在亚洲,非洲,中东,太平洋及其他地方殖民的知识话语的回应。后殖民文学探讨一个国家或民族脱离殖民后带来的问题和后果,尤其是被征服的殖民地民族的政治和文化独立。该论文运用后殖民理论——杂糅来解读作品《耻》。除了讨论杂糅,作者也将介绍西方学术界的后殖民研究。     

The complexity of literacy in Kenya: narrative analysis of Maasai women’s experiences

This paper aims to challenge limited notions of literacy and argues for the recognition of Maasai women’s self-determined learning in order to bring about human development in Kenya. It also seeks to construct a complex picture of literacy, drawing on postcolonial feminist theory as a framework to ensure that the woman’s voice is heard. Through the analysis of narratives from three Maasai women, the author discovered that: (1) these ‘illiterate’ women have their own literacy through which they read the world (their community); (2) these women use this self-determined literacy to raise critical awareness on community issues; and (3) these women have become ‘organic intellectuals’ in that they have the capacity to synthesise information and skills in order to solve community issues by themselves. This paper concludes that a literacy programme should be more centred on the women from the village and must acknowledge their traditions and culture.     

‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’: constructions of otherness in education for sustainable development

The aim of this article is to analyse how good intentions in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) discursively construct and maintain differences between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. The empirical material consists of textbooks about sustainable development used in Swedish schools. An analysis of how ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are constructed and maintained is done with help from critical race theory, whiteness studies and Popkewitz’ notion of double gestures, exclusion through intentions of inclusion. The analysis departs from five dichotomies: tradition/civilisation, dirtiness/purity, chaos/order, ignorance/morality and helped/helping. We consider these dichotomies as cogwheels operating in an ‘Otherness machinery’. Through this machinery, ‘We’ are constructed as knowing, altruistic, conscious and good. The Other is simultaneously constructed as ‘uncivilised’ or as a ‘bad’ Other in need of higher moral standards. With help from these two Others, ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ is formed. The ESD project could then be understood as a colonial and excluding project, and we ask how it is possible to avoid that ‘our common world’ only belong to ‘Us’?     

Children Reading Series Books: Ways into Peer Culture and Reading Development

This article, drawing on research which aimed to explore how young children read English in Singapore, demonstrates how nine-year-old Singaporean children’s voluntary reading of series books served the dual purposes of enabling their membership of the peer group through culturated reading and the independent development of their reading skills and motivation for reading. Using interviews to encourage conversation and reflection, the research examined children’s book choices and their reasons for reading. This formed part of a topic-focussed ethnographic study in three primary schools. In addition, the article seeks to prove that Singaporean children’s choice of series books makes them readers with potential for global, intra-generational, cultural connections rather than familial, inter-generational ones, and it is especially significant educationally for less well-off families where English is not the dominant home language.