Narrative Universals, Emotion, and Ethics

Background: The outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) might affect the psychological health of population, especially medical workers. We aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on emotional and cognitive responses and behavioral coping among Chinese residents. Methods: An online investigation was run from 5 February to 25 February 2020, which recruited a total of 616 Chinese residents. Self-designed questionnaires were used to collect demographic information, epidemic knowledge and prevention of COVID-19 and characteristics of medical workers. The emotional and cognitive responses were assessed via the Symptom Check List-30 (SCL-30) and Yale–Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS). Behavioral coping was assessed via Simplified Coping Style Questionnaire (SCSQ). Results: In total, 131 (21.3%) medical workers and 485 (78.7%) members of the general public completed the structured online survey. The structural equation models showed that emotional response interacted with cognitive response, and both emotional response and cognitive response affected the behavioral coping. Multivariate regression showed that positive coping enhanced emotional and cognitive responses, while negative coping reduced emotional and cognitive responses. The emotional response (depression, anxiety and photic anxiety) scores of the participants were higher than the norm (all p < 0.001); in particular, the panic scores of members of the general public were higher than those of medical workers (p < 0.05), as well as the cognitive response (paranoia and compulsion). Both positive and negative coping scores of the participants were lower than the norm (p < 0.001), and the general public had higher negative coping than medical workers (p < 0.05). Conclusion: During the preliminary stage of COVID-19, our study confirmed the significance of emotional and cognitive responses, which were associated with behavioral coping and significantly influenced the medical workers and the general public’s cognition and level of public health emergency preparedness. These results emphasize the importance of psychological health at times of widespread crisis.

Reviewed by: The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba Philip A. Howard The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. By Lisa Yun . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. 336 pp. $56.50 (cloth); $26.95 (paper and e-book). Employing the testimony of 2,841 Chinese workers initially recruited by British and American companies and later by Cuban traffickers of African slaves and indentured workers to labor in Cuba alongside African slaves, Lisa Yun provides a worthy examination of the lives of Asian immigrant laborers during the last half of the nineteenth century. Positing these workers within the context of the global economy and at a time when the economic growth and prosperity of the North Atlantic world were dependent on the exploitation and oppression of African slaves and East Indian and Chinese indentured workers, Yun demonstrates that employing coolie labor was critical to the shift away from slavery and toward the adoption of free wage labor in Cuba. Although these Chinese workers were theoretically free wage earners, the testimony that some Chinese coolie laborers gave in front of members of a commission sent by the Chinese government to determine their role, status, and treatment in Cuba illuminated the disturbing fact that the majority of them were held and treated in the same fashion as African slaves, argues Yun. As a result, Yun is able to "reexamine the liberal philosophies and assumptions regarding contracts and freedom," as well as the "very structures of a free society, a contractual society based upon the concepts of self-ownership." After exploring the historiography on transitional laborers in the Americas in general, and Cuba specifically, Yun points out that much [End Page 615] of the literature written on the Chinese experience in Cuba underlined the fact that the production of certain commodities, such as sugar, as well as the laws that governed indentured servitude and known as the Chinese Codes transformed the majority of coolies into slaves. For example, the codes required Chinese indentured workers to obtain the permission of their masters to marry. The codes also declared that the status of any child born of a coolie originated from that of the mother. Finally after 1860, the codes denied freedom to any Chinese worker who completed his contract. The latter regulation, better known as "recontracting," tied the coolie to one owner or owners beyond the period of his initial contract. Recontracting made the coolie trade profitable to British, American, and later Cuban commercial interests. As a result, between 1847 and 1877 some 142,000 Chinese arrived in Cuba. Interestingly, another 100,000 Chinese coolies landed in Peru during this time. Yun argues that the Cuban plantocracy sought coolie laborers for many reasons. Two of the most important causes were that they sought to reduce the intensity of the African slave trade to ensure that Cuban society would not resemble, at least demographically, Saint Domingue and experience that country's same violent fate after 1791. The fact that the cost of one coolie tended to be one-third to one-half less than that of an African slave drove demand among Cuban planters. The relatively lower cost of a Chinese indentured worker explains why after British and American companies started the coolie trade, the island's wealthiest African slaveholding families from Havana and Matanzas, particularly the Zulueta family, subsequently replaced them. By the 1860s, the most prominent Cuban slave owners became not only the principal investors in the Asian trade but also the largest holders of coolie workers. To substantiate her thesis that Chinese coolies were held and treated similarly to the African slaves, Yun traced their experiences from the moment they were recruited in China and transported to Cuba. Their "middle passage" resembled that of the African slaves, according to Yun. Once they arrived, the contracts that they signed to work for an individual for a period of eight years were deceptive in nature. Although owners were obligated to pay their workers four pesos monthly, they immediately deducted from their workers' salaries the cost for their clothes and food as well as medical care and "lost-time." As a result, by the time that the contracts...

Injuries are taken to be an everyday part of sport at all levels. A variety of classifications are set out by sports scientists in order to clarify the mechanical and medical nature and the causes of such injuries. Nevertheless, causal investigations into the nature of injury infliction do not explain the social and psychologically embedded reasons that help us to clarify whether their infliction is intentional or unintentional, other- or self-inflicted. There is at present no vocabulary here for the moral aspects of such events. Hence, the moral aspects of other-inflicted injuries is a particularly ripe area for investigation. In particular, I explore a range of emotional responses to such infliction between guilt, regret, and schadenfreude. In contrast to rationalist ethical theories I develop a position in line with earlier neo-Aristotelian work in relation to virtue ethics in sport. Rather than demonstrating how reason ought to control our emotional responses, in sport as elsewhere, I show how our emotional responses are central to our own ethical maturity. Ethical responses and evaluations are thus configurations of feeling, thinking, and acting at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right degree. These are not reducible to codifiable judgment. I distinguish between the concept of causal and moral responsibility in sporting situations in order to open up a fuller and less rationalistic response to injury infliction. In particular I argue that the subjective guilt, felt as a consequence of the unintentional infliction of a serious injury, is not irrational but a fortiori a sign of moral sensitivity.

This chapter considers ethical prototypes, which give needed specificity to the very general ethical orientations defined by principles and parameters. In ethical decision and behavior, we are concerned with sequences of actions and the motivations guiding these actions. In other words, we are concerned with stories. In this chapter, I argue that the prototypes at issue in specifying our ethical orientations are, most importantly, the universal story structures that I have sought to isolate in earlier works – heroic, romantic, sacrificial, family separation, seduction, revenge, and criminal investigation. These narrative structures are inseparable from human emotion systems. Indeed, story universals are shaped by emotion–motivation systems (along with some general patterns in emotion intensification); those systems (and patterns) account for their universality. In addition, these story genres are of crucial importance for the way we think about and respond to various worldly concerns, such as politics. The third chapter extends these arguments to ethics.

Reviewed by: The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad ed. by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin Robert Cliver (bio) The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad Edited by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. Pp. 560. Based on years of collaboration through Stanford University's Chinese Railway Workers in North America Project, this exciting collection of scholarly articles represents a major contribution to labor history and to the new wave of Chinese-American studies that is global in scope but intensely focused on recovering and illuminating the lives of the ten- to fifteen-thousand Chinese workers who constructed the Central Pacific Railroad section of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. Chinese-American histories are rich and varied, but one thing most American students learn about Chinese immigration is that the Chinese built the railroads. Even this simple fact, however, has been obscured in many earlier accounts of the Transcontinental Railroad. (For example, when the United States Transportation Secretary John Volpe spoke at the 1969 centennial of the line's completion, he completely ignored the fact that the workers who accomplished this feat were Chinese.) As co-editors (and co-directors of the project), Chang and Fishkin have brought together a diverse body of research, utilizing a wide range of sources that reveal railway workers' lived experiences, material and spiritual lives, connections to their hometowns, and the diasporic and commercial networks in which they moved. Despite the lack of primary documents from Chinese workers, the researchers were nonetheless able to use sources in creative ways and expand the scope of inquiry to previously unexamined aspects of workers' lives, such as their pursuits after the completion of the line in 1869. Thanks to these collaborative efforts and innovative approaches, every chapter provides exciting new information and insights. The fact that one-third of the book is devoted to notes, bibliography, and index demonstrates these scholars' rigorous research. A superb introductory chapter presents the volume's historiographical and methodological approaches. The other twenty-one chapters are divided into five sections. The "Global Perspectives" section looks beyond the national narrative usually associated with the Transcontinental Railroad to examine the global significance of this achievement and these workers' origins, characteristics, and efforts. Including paths of migration, connections to other parts of the western hemisphere, and worldwide responses, the project places the story of the iron road in a global context. The "Ties to China" section focuses on Chinese workers' connections to their hometowns in South China. It presents hometown (qiaoxiang) and remittance (qiaohui) documents, as well as Chinese songs, poems, and epitaphs. This section exhibits the creativity and sophistication of the research [End Page 1258] and interpretation of sources in the volume and is very informative, even for those knowledgeable about the topic. The eight chapters in the section "Life on the Line" likewise apply innovative methods to explore a wide range of sources, including artifacts that reveal the lived experiences of Chinese railroad workers and the commercial networks that brought them commodities. Other sources include land surveys, artifacts relating to medicine and religion, photographs, and reports by European observers of the railroad's construction. One chapter by Taiwanese scholar Hsinya Huang, utilizes oral histories recorded in tribal archives to reveal the relationships between Native Americans and Chinese workers during and after the railroad's construction (chapter 11). Trade, shared cuisine (such as cabbage dishes), and numerous examples of intermarriage underline an intimate connection between two groups of people whose shared experience of exploitation and discrimination at the bottom of the social hierarchy brought them together in sympathy and kinship. The sections "Chinese Railroad Workers in Cultural Memory" and "Chinese Railroad Workers beyond Promontory" (Promontory, Utah, is the site of the famous "golden spike" event commemorating the railroad's completion) continue transcending well-worn tropes and stereotypes. Three chapters are devoted to American history textbooks, Chinese historiography in the People's Republic of China, and literary sources. Readers find out what happened to Chinese workers in later railroad projects in the United States and Canada, the other occupations they pursued, and more about one of the best-known railway workers turned...

Reviewed by: The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves of Cuba May Fu The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves of Cuba. By Lisa Yun. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008) The Coolie Speaks is a remarkable interdisciplinary text that explores the historical, literary, and philosophical implications of Chinese indentured labor in nineteenth-century Cuba. Lisa Yun offers an exceptional analysis of the 1876 Cuba Commission Report, a compilation of hundreds of coolie testimonies gathered during an investigation into their mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of Cuban sugar planters. She argues that the testimonies, depositions, and petitions associated with the Commission Report evidence the articulation of coolie subjectivity as well as the emergence of a distinct literary and historical form she terms the coolie narrative. In doing so, she extends those arguments which simplistically cast Chinese indentured workers as racial anomalies located in between Cuba’s Black-white racial binary or as laborers who mediated the transition from a slave to free economy in Cuba. The written and oral testimonies of Chinese workers – as acts of resistance, critique, and narrative – form the basis of the book’s analysis. Yun analyzes the detailed and often tragic accounts of coolie indentured laborers who worked in tension with African slaves and under oppressive conditions on Cuban plantations. She identifies not only how workers challenged, rebelled, and conspired against planter authority, but also how the act of testifying enabled them to articulate their historical voice, record family affiliations, construct collective memory, and communicate across linguistic, national, social, and class divisions. Her close examination of coolies’ responses reveals the fascinating ethnic and class heterogeneity of the workers themselves, disrupting modernist assumptions of a universal, homogenized coolie subject. Attuned to the multiple conditions that structured the state-sanctioned Commission interviews, Yun unravels the political, economic, and social contexts through which the testimonies were secured, transcribed, and produced. By laying bare the politics and ideologies that delimited the interviews, Yun offers a generative analysis of coolie subjectivity as both critical and symptomatic of the racial, social, and economic contradictions of modern liberalism. With primary sources that include testimonies, political tracts, travelers’ accounts, legislation, and historical writings, Yun reveals how Chinese indentured workers embodied the contradiction between the promise of free contract labor and the brutal reality of everyday life on sugar plantations. Centering the experiences of Chinese laborers in her analysis, she investigates the modern contract as a mechanism that actively enabled conditions of slavery rather than disabling it. Her careful reading of coolie testimonies makes apparent “the disingenuous representation of freedom as contract and the actual practice of slavery via the contract” (139). Widely considered a legal instrument of free agency and agreement, the modern contract functioned as a disciplining mechanism for Chinese workers whose hopes and bodies were ensnared in the promises of an always deferred liberation. One of the book’s most important contributions is its identification of a coolie narrative. Like the African slave autobiography and narrative, the coolie narrative has “the quality of being transpirational – to make known what was suppressed or secret, to exhale, to leak out what had transpired” (56). It is also characterized by “featured verse, literary allusions, historical references, cultural metaphors, and repeated tropes of witnessing, veracity, and resistance” that together expose the colonial economies, racial formations, and modernist contradictions that marked colonial Cuba (56). As such, the coolie narrative provides a generative historical and literary tool for cultural and social analysis. Yun closes her detailed reading of coolie narratives with an unprecedented exploration of the life and writings of Antonio Chuffat Latour. Chuffat was a second-generation Afro-Chinese author who wrote Apunte histórico de los chinos en Cuba, a social history of the Chinese in Cuba during the dynamic period of abolition and independence. Yun credits Chuffat’s 1927 book as the earliest text to frame the Chinese experience in Cuba as a subaltern history intimately linked to the history of African slavery on the island. It also anticipated the work of subsequent scholars with its impressive portrayal of Chinese ethnic organizations, class formation, transnational politics, cultural groups, and diaspora. Like her treatment of the coolie narrative, Yun understands Chuffat’s...

Can Hearing Aids Affect Emotional Response to Sound?

From the 1890s to the 1930s the cocoa plantations of the southwest Pacific relied on Pacific Islander and Asian indentured labor from China and Vietnam. In Samoa and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) white planters lobbied colonial administrations for permission to introduce Chinese under contract as indentured labor, a coercive and controversial labor system. This article points to the role of transimperial economic competition in encouraging the use of indentured labor, traversing German, French, and British colonial administrations in the Pacific. Cocoa cultivation, white planters argued, required more regular attention compared with sugar or copra, and Chinese indentured workers were deemed the most suitable to meet these requirements. Australian, New Zealand and British administrators in the Pacific, who were keenly aware of ongoing French indenture practices, lobbied to introduce and retain indentured labor. Without the perceived competitive edge of indentured labor, cocoa cultivation was considered unlikely to prosper. It was not until the mid-1930s that recruitment of Chinese indentured labor ended. It came at a time of international and Chinese calls for abolition of coerced labor but was also driven by anti-immigration and pro-white nationalist sentiments. Even after recruitment ceased, the New Zealand administration in Samoa obliged Chinese workers to remain on the cocoa plantations. While the French did repatriate Chinese recruits, they retained Vietnamese workers. Only after 1945 were indentured workers freed from the obligation to cultivate cocoa, and finally permitted to abandon the plantations.

Consumers’ acceptance of recycled water in meat products: The influence of tasting, attitudes and values on hedonic and emotional reactions

BackgroundThe term second victim describes a healthcare professional who has been involved in an adverse event and feels wounded by the event. The effects of this experience differ. It can present as second victim syndrome, describing a wide range and degree of emotional and behavioural responses. Studies show that medical students can also experience second victim. The aim of this study was to elucidate medical students’ experiences, perceptions, and management of second victim and second victim syndrome and to describe possible learning needs around these issues.MethodsThirteen medical students and two recent medical graduates participated in semi-structured focus group interviews. The interviews lasted 1.5–2 h and were audiotaped, transcribed, and analysed using Braun and Clarke’s six-step approach for thematic analysis.ResultsFour main themes were identified: contributing factors; current coping strategies; perception of own requirements and learning needs; wishes for the future healthcare system. Students’ behavioural and emotional response to dilemmas were affected by stakeholders and practices embedded in the healthcare system. Students described patient-injury and unexpected events as triggers for second victim, but also harmful interactions with individuals and feelings of self-blame. Students’ coping centred around their network, formal offers, and separation of personal- and work-life. Students sought a clear definition of second victim and a desire for role-models. Students' wished to learn how to handle feeling like a burden to others, managing waiting time after patient complaints, and learning how to help second victims recover. Students emphasized the importance of the healthcare organisation understanding students’ needs and providing them relevant support. ConclusionStudents experience second victim as described in the literature. Students’ emotional responses were caused by classical second victim triggers, but also other triggers in the educational environment: harmful interactions and self-blame. Although some triggers differ from the second victim definition, these different triggers should be considered equally serious and acknowledged. We must aim to prepare students for future adverse events and emotional responses. The health organisation and healthcare professionals must support students’ mental well-being and contribute to ideal conditions for students' professional development and management of second victim as future physicians.

Machine translation (MT) and post-editing (PE) have become increasingly common in translation training (Guerberof-Arenas and Moorkens 2019; Sánchez Ramos 2022). However, few studies have explored how trainee translators’ emotional responses to MT and PE impact their motivation to incorporate these tools in their translation practice. Understanding and managing the emotions of students is crucial to integrating MT and PE within translator training as a whole, and to fully preparing students for their professional careers. Building on previous studies applying emotional narrative analysis to translators’ experiences with technology (Koskinen and Ruokonen 2017; Ruokonen and Koskinen 2017), this article explores the emotional responses of a group of 35 Spanish undergraduate translation students to MT and PE using an emotional narrative methodology. Participants were asked to write an emotional narrative in the form of either a love letter or a break-up letter addressed to MT. Overall, participants were found to be more positive than negative in their attitude towards MT and PE. Among the 35 emotional narratives, there were 20 love letters and 15 break-up letters. Thematic analysis revealed two main themes in the students’ narratives relating to (1) satisfaction with MT output and (2) the efficiency of MT. These exploratory findings reinforce Yang and Wang’s (2019) call for more research into what factors contribute to students’ intention to use MT and the consequent effects of using MT. They can also inform pedagogy so that translator trainers better understand the factors that motivate students to incorporate MT in their translation practice.

Reviewed by: Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen López Joseph L Scarpaci Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History. Kathleen López. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. 2013. 352 pp., maps, photos, tables, notes. $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-4696-0713-9), $24.95. The new millennium cast into the academic and general public’s dialect the word ‘globalization’ as well as the call that everyone should ‘think globally and act locally.’ That may be all well and good, but this adage often falls flat when scholars aim to connect the local with global (glocal). Like the words ‘impact,’ ‘effect,’ and ‘affect,’ the terms at once say everything but communicate [End Page 234] little. As the graduate coordinator of my doctoral program was fond of harping in front of frightened graduate students many decades back, “perfectly general, perfectly true, but absolutely meaningless.” Clichés, alas, often substitute for deep, critical thinking and analysis. For these reasons, when one sees a subtitle that includes the ambitiously stated ‘transnational history,’ a little skepticism inevitably comes to mind. Geographers are no doubt even more skeptical because, after all, scale and spatial analysis situate both human and physical geographies in the broader context of social and natural sciences, respectively. Enter Kathleen López: Assistant Professor of History and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies (a title that might also give one pause) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Whereas many Latinamericanist geographers struggle to speak any semblance of Spanish and conduct fieldwork with the assistance of Latin American and Caribbean scholars, Dr. López approaches the study of transnational migration to the island of Cuba armed with fluent Spanish and Chinese. Armed with extensive field work in Cuba, China, and the United States, Dr. López assembles a tour d’force that brings archival, ethnographic, and historic analyses to bear on a story that traces the history of Chinese migrants to Cuba in the nineteenth century, through the alliance with Cuban forces to overturn the colonial yoke imposed by Madrid, to the twentieth century events that include strong xenophobia, the Japanese-China war, WW II, and the Cuban Revolution. Copiously referenced and gracefully written, Chinese Cubans tells the tale of a truly global transnational migration pattern that documents how the Chinese in Cuba used investment, remittances, and return visits to bridge these migrants’ search for the best of Cuba and their homeland. The tale begins with the importation of more than 100,000 Chinese workers – indentured servants often treated as slaves because of Great Britain’s objection to the African slave trade—who build rail lines and work in sugar plantations in ways similar to how Chinese ‘coolie’ workers did in the United States. Chinese Cubans were fiercely loyal to the Cuban independence movement of the nineteenth century, and great accolades were given to them by the fiercest and most venerable of revolutionary fighters. Unlike conditions in Peru, Jamaica, and the especially harsh anti-Chinese movement in Mexico in the 1930s, we learn that Cuba was relatively welcoming (overall) in receiving the Chinese diaspora. They added to the miscegenation (mestizaje) stew (ajiaco) that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz highly praised. However, to López’s credit, she calls into question the much-venerated Ortíz’s description of this marginal contribution to Cuban culture (which Ortíz postulated that, numerically at least, was a European and African fusion). The so-called ‘third founder’ of Cuba (after Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt), Ortíz derided Chinese immigrants for their certain tolerance of homosexuality, their (limited) use of opium. That is why he classified them phenotypically (i.e., “yellow mongoloids”….”and essential otherness” (p. 210). Readers will find that similar prejudices hurled upon immigrants elsewhere were also cast upon Chinese Cubans. They were often characterized as ‘inassimilable’ just as Jews were in Europe in the twentieth century and much the way Mexicans are portrayed in the current U.S. immigration debacle. When hard economic times fell upon Cuba, anti-nationalism was whipped up against Cubans of Chinese descent, who were often portrayed as perennial strike breakers and ‘scabs.’ [End Page 235] Not surprisingly, there are indirect parallels to be drawn...

Reviewed by: Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture After 9/11 by Georgiana Banita Aaron Derosa Georgiana Banita. Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture After 9/11. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. xiv + 357 pp. Banita’s ambitious project surveys a constellation of interrelated discourses—trauma, exceptionalism, transnationalism, alterity, and surveillance, to name a few—orbiting around “narrative ethics” in post-9/11 fiction. The theoretical frame that orders these disparate discourses rests on figures like Emmanuel Levinas, Martha Nussbaum, and J. Hillis Miller: ethicists who explore the intersection of Self and Other. Her refreshing choice of texts expands 9/11 fiction beyond the now-ossifying canon—she only foregrounds two canonical texts: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers—and moves her project toward a coverage model without sacrificing analytical depth. For better or worse, the engagement with so many different—and often competing—discourses undercuts a unified thesis. As she puts it, “The specific concerns that structure this book . . . seek to encode the broad cultural reach of post-9/11 literature and its granularly sophisticated ethical questions” (5). This “broad cultural reach” promotes dialogue about what post-9/11 ethics might look like rather than arguing for a particular ethical valence. For instance, in an introductory survey of the field, Banita alternately describes post-9/11 narrative ethics in terms “of deriving ethical norms from the representations of evil” in Jess Walter’s The Zero (6), preserving a “paralytic condition” in Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (7), and demonstrating “that forgetfulness is, in fact, the ultimate ethical act” in Ward Just’s Forgetfulness (9), among others. Each claim offers new possibilities for a post-9/11 narrative ethic but represents red herrings in the overall schema of Banita’s argument, which focuses on five specific concerns: “ethical spectatorship, psychoanalysis, race, transnationalism, and surveillance” (5). These five concepts structure the subsequent chapters. The first chapter on ethical spectatorship addresses how the protagonists in DeLillo, Spiegelman, and Helen Schulman’s A Day at the Beach confront the visual spectacle of the 9/11 trauma and how this might lead to more informed connections with the world. For Banita, DeLillo provides multiple modes of ethical spectatorship, from the Giorgio Morandi paintings that “cauterize [the wound] and reinstate a sense of coherence through the tidy arrangement of things in space” (70) to the performance artist who “opens up a space of connection and facilitates an encounter with the traumatic event that allows it to be worked through by means of collective mourning” (71). In very different ways—but perhaps in her most stunning close reading of the monograph—Banita beautifully weaves an analysis of [End Page 162] Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers with a reading of Maus. Here, the images of suicide and smoking that invoke Spiegelman’s mother’s death and the smokestacks at Auschwitz are appropriated in the post-9/11 moment to comment on the ethics of “silence, representation, and historical commemoration” (76). For instance, the absence of Spiegelman’s mother’s narrative in Maus reflects the absent narratives of the anonymous jumpers with whom Spiegelman has difficulty connecting. The visual “ventriloquism” of placing himself in the position of the falling man is a “first step toward performing ethical identification and responsiveness to the suffering of others” (84). Witnessing necessitates the accommodation of the tragedy in our own lives. Balancing these two perspectives is Schulman’s A Day at the Beach, in which the jumpers outside the protagonist’s window are juxtaposed against the simultaneous televisual images. “The tension between these two forms of visual experience” demands trauma be “anchor[ed] firmly in daily life” (93). Between DeLillo’s artistic sensibility and Spiegelman’s personalized historicization of the tragedy, Schulman promotes “not the recovery of a complete, harmonious self, but the acknowledgment of Otherness and of [the protagonist’s] responsibility to it” (107). The subsequent chapters follow a similar structural mode: one or two texts are used to demonstrate a difficult ethical perspective before the chapter culminates in some middle ground and a representative text. But each chapter provides a unique...

This study examines three narratives by contemporary minority writers who write in the German language: Die Orangen des Prasidenten (2011) by Abbas Khider, Im Grenzland (2001) by Sherko Fatah, and Die Sehnsucht der Schwalbe (2002) by Rafik Schami. By analyzing these texts through a framework of narrative ethics that relies on the work of narratologists such as Wayne Booth, James Phelan, Seymour Chatman, and Monika Fludernik, this study seeks to understand readers’ possible ethical responses. The framework of narrative ethics sheds light on how these texts function to prompt a reader’s open-ended exploration of ethical issues. This study is a first of its kind, not for its methodology, which has long existed in the realm of canonical literatures, but for the intersection of methodology and subject matter. It seeks to show that narrative ethics has a role — perhaps a particularly fertile one — when used to explore German language texts written by writers from migrant backgrounds. In the field of minority and migrant German literature, it aims to refocus attention on the reader’s experience with texts by exploring whether such texts achieve the often-stated goal (which was advanced by early promoters of migrant literature in the 1980s and is still prevalent in the marketing of this literature today) of allowing readers to explore Otherness.

While the concept of responsibility is a cornerstone of Christian ethics, recognition theory still lacks a thorough theological–ethical analysis. This essay seeks to fill the gap and develop normative ethics of recognition and responsibility. The first part provides a systematic analysis of the conceptual elements of recognition, emphasizing the need to focus on misrecognition as a heuristic tool and ethical priority. While recognition coincides with responsivity and attentiveness in the encounter of self and other, responsibility adds to this the moral accountability for acts, practices, structures, and institutions, rendering recognition and responsibility interrelated but also distinct principles of morality. This normative analysis is then correlated to the hermeneutical, narrative ethics of Christian ethics. The founding narrative of biblical ethics, the Cain and Abel narrative in Gen 4, is interpreted as a dialectic of recognition and responsibility. Both exegesis and ethics profit from this interdisciplinary and correlative approach between philosophical and biblical ethics. Finally, the ethics of recognition and responsibility, which emerges from the Frankfurt School critical theory, is confronted with exemplary indigenous approaches focusing on mutual responsibility as the foundation of ecological ethics. Christian ethics of recognition and responsibility resonates with this approach, yet emphasizes the distinctiveness of human interactions and the demands of moral responsibility.