The Saljuq Turks’ Conversion to Islam: The Crusading Sources

This article contributes to the important debate over the conversion of the Turks to Islam. Previously, it was thought that the Turks abandoned their former steppe faith and customs very swiftly to become staunch Sunni Muslims, but this view has recently been challenged by a number of studies. The current consensus seems to be that the Turks’ adoption of Islam was a process of far longer duration, spanning many decades. This article broadens this discussion by demonstrating that the chronicles written by the First Crusaders contain much useful information that is pertinent to this question. It works through these texts, showing that they can shed new light on this point.     

What is a good father? The meaning of a good father through sports parenting in South Korea

Abstract

The purpose of the current study is to uncover the meanings that constitute a good father within the context of a sports/leisure setting and to analyse how these meanings are enacted in practice. Results showed that the ‘good father’ of today, as perceived by fathers, is a multifaceted construct that is construed through their interactions with other family members. First, fathers constructed the meanings of a good father through the memories of their own fathers during their childhood. Second, fathers constructed the meanings through their relationship with their wives. They regarded sport parenting as an important practice for them to be a good husband to their wives. Finally, fathers constructed the meanings of a good father through their relationships with their children and the time spent with their children was a particularly important requirement for them to fulfil their role as a good father.     

Delinking rhetorics of neoliberalism: An analysis of South American leftist presidents’ speeches

We analyze the so-called Socialism of the twenty-first century in which nine South American governments turned to the left over the last 15 years. This South American socialist turn is seen as a delinking from the logics of dependency and pure neoliberalism. To explore the rhetorics that underlie this delinking process, we conducted both a macroanalysis and an intradiscursive rhetorical analysis of the inauguration and most significant speeches of all of the leftist South American presidents elected after 1999. We claim that a common critique of neoliberalism underlies the South American presidents’ speeches, which manifests through specific rhetorics concerning participatory democracy, social inclusion, and environmental protection. When they became transnational, these delinking rhetorics crafted a decolonial critique that calls for more indigenous models of development.     

熊十力诠释《诗经》学的向度探析

《诗经》是“六经”之一,熊十力对《诗经》进行新的诠释,走的是一条“经学泛哲学化”的理路,把“四科”之中的“义理之科”作为“六经”之宗,没有“义理之科”的贞定,“经济之科”“考据之科”“文学之科”乃茫荡无根据。他明确指出《诗经》一定有《诗传》,并强调“诗可以兴,可以观,可以群,可以怨”是《诗传》的总纲领。同时认为,《诗经》里面的诗歌,大多出自“农家”学派之手。《诗经》中有大量表现“怨”的诗,当作孟子的论断“《诗》亡然后《春秋》作”的原因。熊十力对《诗经》中《二南》诗高度重视,之所以读《关雎》得出“思无邪”的评价,缘见得人生本来清净、真实,不须作更多的猜想。同时他指出了中国宗教之所以不兴的原因,即“即事多所欣”。在日常生活里,自有一种欣悦、和适、勤勉、温柔、敦厚、庄敬、日强等等的意趣,用不着起什么恐怖,也不须幻想什么天国,并要求我们通过解读《二南》,识得人生的意义与价值,大步走上人生的坦途,向前努力,而不至于面墙了,表达了熊十力对人生理想的美好追求。     

Korean-Wave celebrities between global capital and regional nationalisms

This article examines conflicts over the transnationalization of South Korean celebrities in the wake of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) in the twenty-first century. I consider a number of celebrity controversies to argue that the demands placed upon Hallyu celebrities by domestic observers, foreign audiences, and global capital are fundamentally irreconcilable. South Korean nationalist appropriation of Hallyu, as well as the local celebrity culture, demand that Hallyu stars firstly be exemplary Korean patriots, whereas international audiences expect sympathy for their own causes. Local nationalist agendas have proven particularly troublesome because of postcolonial sensibilities and ongoing territorial disagreements between South Korea and its neighbors. Finally, as circulating commodities and commercial assets, Hallyu stars are also pledged to global capital. Their value is highest when they appeal to as broad an audience as possible and alienate no one with their politics. An apolitical neutrality on regionally controversial issues, however, is an untenable position when antagonistic geopolitical interests are concerned and nationalist passions flare. I situate this argument within critical scholarship on cultural globalization flows within Asia, while engaging celebrity studies to frame Hallyu stars as transnational commodities.     

The Persuasive Influence of Nollywood Film in Cultural Transmission: Negotiating Nigerian Culture in a South African Environment

The popularity and viewership of Nollywood films have expanded across African and Western cities especially those with considerable Diaspora population. This study seeks to investigate whether watching Nollywood films is likely to lead to cross-cultural transmission of Nigeria’s cultural heritage to audience members in South Africa. Data for the study were collected using observation and surveys with Likert-type scales involving participants from a South African college. Results show that watching Nollywood films was significant in increasing participants’ knowledge and appreciation of Nigerian culture. Observed patterns indicate that a small portion of participants could mimic or reproduce some common Nigerian expressions and exclamations while a negligible percentage of participants could actually speak a smattering of Igbo, one of Nigeria’s three major languages.     

Conceptualizing an East Asian popular culture

Since the 1980s, popular cultural products have criss‐crossed the national borders of East Asian countries, enabling a discursive construction of an ‘East Asian Popular Culture’ as an object of analysis. The present essay is a preliminary attempt to provide some conceptual and analytic shape to this object, delineated by its three constitutive elements of production, distribution and consumption. Each East Asian location participates in different and unequal levels in each of these component processes. Production can either be located entirely in a single geographic location or, alternatively, each of the necessary constituent sub‐processes can be executed from different locations; preference for either arrangement tends to reflect the relative dominance of the production location in exporting its finished products. Consumption and thus consumers are geographically located within cultural spaces in which they are embedded. Meanings and viewing pleasures are generated within the local cultures of specific audience. Conceptually, among the several possible consumption positions, the one in which an audience watches an imported programme is most intriguing. In this viewing position, differences between the cultures of the location of consumption and that of the production location become most apparent. The audience member has to bring his or her own cultural context to bear on the content of the imported product and read it accordingly. In this sense, the cultural product may be said to have crossed a ‘cultural’ boundary, beyond the simple fact of its having been exported/imported into a different location as an economic activity. Such an audience position requires the consumer to transcend his or her grounded nationality to forge abstract identification with the foreign characters on screen, a foreignness that is, in turn, potentially reabsorbed into an idea of (East) ‘Asia’; a potential ‘East Asian identity’, emerging from consumption of popular cultural products, is thus imaginable.     

“Happy Seoul for foreigners”: scenes from multicultural life in South Korea

Abstract

Since the mid-2000s, multiculturalism has become a prominent buzzword in South Korea as the nation, which was founded on the myth of a single bloodline, tries to come to terms with its growing foreign population. This article looks at the figure of the industrial migrant worker who, despite being ignored by the mainstream media, has appeared in a handful of independently produced Korean films, including three—Bandhobi (2009 Bandhobi [???]. 2009. Directed by Shin Dong-il. Seoul: IndieStory Inc. [Google Scholar]), Hello, Stranger (2007 Hello Stranger [?? ?? ???]. 2007. Directed by Kim Dong-hyun. Seoul: IndieStory Inc. Host and Guest [???]. 2005. Directed by Shin Dong-il. Seoul: LJ Film. [Google Scholar]), Where Is Ronny? (2008 Where Is Ronny? [??? ???]. 2008. Directed by Sim Sang-kook. Seoul: JinJin Pictures. [Google Scholar])—that will be discussed here in detail. These films, as I will show, not only provide an alternative perspective on immigrant life in Seoul and other parts of the country, which is more often than not represented through the privileged world of the Western “expat,” but also reveal the underlying tensions and contradictions in Korea's approach to multiculturalism as it tries to regulate diversity through the fiat of legislative policy while ignoring the moral and political choices confronting its citizens as they decide whether or not to befriend the other.     

The camera in pain: memories of the Cold War in East Asian independent documentaries

Abstract

This article begins with a discussion of the changing topography of cultural production in East Asia over the last 25?years, especially as it concerns the genre of independent documentary film, and then it turns to three independent documentaries filmed in Japan and North Korea, South Korea and Japan, and China, respectively: Yang Yong-hi's Dear Pyongyang (2005 Dear Pyongyang. 2005. Directed by Yang Yong-hi. Busan International Film Festival. [Google Scholar]), Mun Jeong-hyun's Grandmother's Flower (2007 Grandmother's Flower. 2007. Directed by Mun Jeong-hyun. Busan International Film Festival: [Google Scholar]), and Wang Bing's He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2006). Erased from the official historical record and excluded from public commemoration, the alternate history of pain traced by these documentaries resubmits the Cold War to examination from deep inside its most private wounds. In the process, the filmmakers encounter not only the memories of the earlier generation that lived through the most violent episodes of the Cold War, but also come to question their own history and identities within the process of the Cold War's decomposition.     

‘Bloodhounds as Detectives’

ABSTRACT

This article explores the nineteenth-century origins of the sniffer dog in one of the most notorious homicide investigations in British history, focusing on Scotland Yard's attempts to use the reputed olfactory powers of pure-bred English bloodhounds in the hunt for London's East End serial murderer Jack the Ripper in 1888. This episode has been historiographically overlooked in part because the dogs were never actually deployed. However, the failure to unleash dogs on the Ripper's trail turns out to be critically significant, opening up a space through which the historical contingencies and social meanings of dog-breeding and training practices can be explored and scrutinized. As a crime-solving tool, utilized for the purpose of investigating metropolitan crime, canine detection posed distinct problems. Proponents of bloodhound detection had to contend with various cultural, material and practical challenges, in order to guarantee the canines as reliable hunters in an environment that was contaminated by slum odour.