Resilience and Resistance: Amazigh Women’s Agency in French Colonial Morocco

Historical studies of Middle Eastern Arab women have largely ignored experiences of women's labor and working-class activism in theorizing about gender and nation. This article examines working women's militancy in the context of French colonialism and the national state in Lebanon from 1940 to 1946. The dominant narratives on labor and national struggles, whether in daily newspapers, in schoolbooks, or in academic studies, have offered little space for women, revealing the gender imbalance in the writing, or rather the unwriting, of their activism. By reinscribing gender into this history, the narrative of "nation construction" becomes less cohesive, challenged and undermined by class and gendered formations. Working women tied anticolonial struggle to labor demands, casting their roles not in terms of domesticity or pre-industrial images of motherhood, but rather in terms of waged work. Meanwhile, gender-specific realities, rather than membership in a union or the Communist party, shaped women's consciousness and collective organization in improving their conditions and experiences at the workplace.

Monastic Practices Countering a Culture of Consumption

This introductory article explains the aims of the interdisciplinary conference Masculinity and the Other held at Balliol College, Oxford, August 29-30, 2007, at which all of the papers comprising this special issue of Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies were first presented. It points out the prominence which the notions of the boy and boyhood and the life-cycle enjoyed at the conference and seeks more generally to suggest the benefits a more fully integrated discussion of these topics might bring to the fields of masculinity and gender studies. Keywords: boys, boyhood, masculinity In the scholarship of the last twenty years, there has been a major move away from treating gender as an essentialist identity. In particular, men's studies, which developed in the 1980s in response to a predominantly feminist critique of male power structures, have undergone a veritable sea-change. Instead of stressing the idea of innate and fundamental differences between men and women (sometimes termed the separate-anddifferent cultures mode11), masculine identity has been increasingly treated as a highly contingent social construct. No longer is the study of masculinity restricted to a relatively small number of academic fields (primarily sociology, psychology and cultural studies), but has become instead one of the most vibrant areas of interdisciplinary investigation. R.W. Connell (1998) has referred to this change as the ethnographic moment of the 1990s, when history, cultural anthropology and other disciplines grounded in empirical research and focused on the importance of cultural context became increasingly interested in the formation of male identity. The emergence of a range of new sub-disciplines focused on the study of masculinity has been the result. Prominent among these has been the history of masculinity which developed under the auspices of scholars such as John Tosh and Michael Roper in the early 1990s (Tosh & Roper, 1991; Tosh, 1994), and has since become one of the most popular and innovative fields of historical inquiry. The move towards interdisciplinarity in masculinity studies has been accompanied by growing scepticism about the predominantly structuralist analyses which informed men's studies in the late 1970s and 1980s. Increasingly, scholars have questioned the claim of writers such as Andrew Tolson (1977) and Jeff Hearn (1987) that socio-economic structures and power relations have been chiefly responsible for determining forms of masculinity. In the 1990s, R.W. Connell (1995), among others, argued for a multiplicity of masculinities which did much to undermine existing ideas of male identity as essential and universal, possessed by all men, regardless of age, class, ethnicity or any other cultural marker. In recent years, however, Connell's own work has been criticized for being too closely wedded to a neo-Marxist methodology which unduly privileges the role played by power relations in the formation of identity. With the increasing popularity of social constructionist theories in masculinity studies, scholars such as Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill (1997) have questioned Connell's emphasis on hegemony and hierarchy, arguing that it underestimates the extent to which the formation of masculine identity is characterized by fluidity, fragmentation and contradiction. Clearly, the impact of power relations cannot be ignored in any study of masculinity; their role, however, must be problematized as part of a critical analysis which does not treat them as constant and immovable. In addition, some have argued that Connell's pro-feminist stance and preoccupation with the concept of gender oppression has led her to overestimate the importance of the male-female binary in the construction of masculine identity. More recently, scholars have stressed the need to examine how a variety of cultural markers such as age, class and ethnicity, as well as gender, interact and combine in the complex process of identity formation. …

The article develops a model which conceptualizes headquarter-subsidiary relations in the multinational corporation as a multilevel discursive struggle between key managers. At the first level, the relations are conceptualized as a discursive struggle over decisions and actions using rationalistic discourses. At the second level, they are viewed as a discursive struggle over power relations using control and autonomy discourses. Finally, underlying the first two, at the third level, headquarter-subsidiary relations are conceptualized as a discursive struggle over managers’ worldviews using cultural (pre)conceptions about “the self” and “the other.”

This paper addresses eco-discourse by the corporate rhetor that emerged in the wake of two environmental disputes. While such green business rhetoric might be conventionally viewed as a category of crisis communication, it is treated here as an instrument of corporate sensemaking and discursive struggle. Specifically, I analyze the "language games" between the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and its critics that arose over Shell UK's plans to decommission the Brent Spar and Shell Nige ria's operations in Ogoniland, a tribal community in the Niger Delta. I demon strate that Shell's rhetorical contests had constitutive effects on its environmental and human rights policies and practices and led to its cautious embrace of the language of sustainable development. Combining sensemaking and Foucauldian approaches, I argue that such local conflicts over meaning-making around the nat ural environment must be understood in terms of discursive struggle at the socio- political level where they both reflect and influence the dynamics of cultural and institutional change.

Studies as a discipline has undergone tremendous changes since its beginning in the 1970s, and it continues to transform in innovative ways. According to the 1999 National Studies Association (NWSA) Task Force, the issue of diversifying faculty and course offerings continues to be at the heart of the new initiatives of studies programs and departments across the country: Women's Studies has developed its theory base by examining the interconnected effects of race, class, sexuality, physical ability, region, and ethnicity on lives, and attracts a diverse range of students. Therefore, including as part of the core curriculum courses that bring racism, classism, homophobia, and other vectors of oppression into focus continues to hold priority in program development nationally (1999). Critical race theory (CRT) has both broadened and sharpened thought by diversifying studies curriculum. CRT began with several important premises that profoundly altered understanding of social reality: that racism is the norm, not the exception, in American society; that our current cultural construction of reality must be challenged with antiracist rhetoric and agenda; and, lastly, that liberalism must be critiqued for it may have done more good for whites than people of color (Delgado 1995). How all of these translate into pedagogy and thought is complex, but one of the most significant analytical results is the development of the intersectionality of different identities as a central site for examining the of women of color (Crenshaw 1997). As Angela P. Harris has argued, in a world where essentialism and racial essentialism exist, black will always be forcibly fragmented before being subjected to analysis, as those who are 'only interested in race' and those who are 'only interested in gender' take their separate slices of our lives (1995, 255; see also Crenshaw 1989). In other words, race and gender studied separately renders an incomplete understanding of the realities of women of color. Furthermore, those who maintain that there is a monolithic feminist or women's experience in the end only promote and embrace white voice and as the dominant narrative (Harris 1995, 256).

This article examines two cities of discordant colonial heritage in India—Chandernagore, a former French colony in West Bengal, and Panjim, a former Portuguese territory in Goa—to demonstrate how these cities experience their colonial identities through heritage spaces. It explores the ways in which the museums and public spaces of these cities use memory and materiality to perform discordant colonial pasts which differ from the dominant narrative of the British Raj. Conceptualising discordance as a framework to trace the unique ways in which the museums and public heritage sites of these two cities mobilise their French and Portuguese colonial heritage, the article shows how these discordant colonial cities distinguish themselves from the British Raj and its legacies. The article affirms these differences not in terms of a duality, but a continual process of convergence and divergence that is mutually constitutive of heritage practices in the cities.

Just Fantasy? Online Pornography's Contribution to Experiences of Harm

The purpose and objectives of our study are to consider the axiological values of the family in the traditional Ukrainian society of the late nineteenth - early twentieth century, based on the material of oral creativity. This is relevant in terms of studying and promoting the ethos values of Ukrainian society, its best ethnic traditions, and mental qualities. The values of the genus and the family were highly valued in the Ukrainian traditional society. They were the basis of the material and spiritual life of human. This homo-centricity was widely reflected in oral poetry, both prose and song. The image of the kindred (family) in Ukrainian folklore rises to the level of higher existential values of human. The importance of the genus and the family in folk culture, in particular folklore, was written by M. Kostomarov, P. Zhitetsky, M. Sumtsov, I. Franko, V. Hnatyuk, M. Gaidai, M. Pasyak, A. Dey, N. Shumada, V. Skrypnyk and others. In the verbal creativity, there were echoes of the generic structure of society, when the survival of primitive people was possible only in the collective ¬- tribal community. Joint work and residence required regulation of behavior, observance of the rules of coexistence. At this time, simple norms of morality were developed in the clan communities, which included patriarchal families: respect for the father (heads of the family) and elders, the burning of the younger and weak, the patriotism, the respect of the deceased, the family, collectivism. The concept of "genus", "family", "relatives", "native land", "homeland" in folklore are verbalized in the concept of "own"/"stranger". The greatest punishment in ancient times was expulsion from the family, abandonment, deprivation of relatives. In folk songs and other folklore genres depicted the subordinate position of a woman (young woman) in a new family, marginal status of an orphan, widow. In the sense of the homeland, country or family, there may be a hut, which in this meaning gathers the cabaret measurements both externally and internally (archetypes: house-field-temple). Through the genus, the family comes to realize the affiliation of the individual to a larger formation as the state, formed a sense of patriotism, love for their homeland. The high aspiration to the "proper", its merger with the existing, is found in the carol-loving world of an ideal peasant family, where peace, harmony and love prevail, each has its own purpose and scope of duties, behaves in accordance with established ages and sexual norms

This article analyses the social act of remembering among the Gannunkeebe in northern Benin, predominantly descendants of slaves of the Fulbe. It raises methodological issues concerning the possibility of gaining access to memories of the daily life experiences of a community whose members possess their own factual history but one which - unlike the 'things-worth-remembering' history of their masters - offers little scope for the creation of traditions of collective identity. Hence the slaves' descendants often remain silent, negating their own stories. In consequence the everyday experience of slaves is transmitted not so much in verbal as in corporeal remembering. This process of embodying memories is the main subject of the article. Although the circumstances transmitted by slaves' descendants cannot always be traced directly to colonial influences, the colonial authorities do often feature in the fragments of remembered history. The Gannunkeebe paint an ambivalent picture of the colonial period: on the one hand, the authorities are depicted as welcomed strangers, associated with the end of slavery; on the other, they represent military service and forced labour, under which slaves were the worst hit, frequently being sent as substitutes for their masters to colonial recruitment. Even if French colonialism at the beginning of the twentieth century punished slave raiding and the slave trade, it did not challenge the master-slave relationship at the core of the Fulbe community. Orally transmitted knowledge shows that slaves were not passive victims but actively constructed their daily life as social agents, albeit subject to their masters' power to determine whose labour was placed at the disposal of the colonial administration.

This study interrogates how the French empire was imagined in three literary representations of French colonialism: the conquest of Tahiti, and the established colonial systems in Martinique and in India. The study is the first in either English or French to demonstrate that representations of power relations, as well as the broader discourses with which they were linked, were as closely concerned with probing the similarities and differences of rival European colonial systems as they were with reinforcing their imagined superiority over the colonized, and that such power relations should not be conceptualized as a dualistic categorization of ‘colonizer’ versus ‘colonized’. In doing so, it aims to go beyond examining the interaction between colonized and colonizer, or between colonial centre and periphery, and to interrogate instead the circulation of ideas and practices across different sites of European colonialism, drawing attention to a historical complexity which has been neglected in the necessary race to recover voices previously occluded from academic analysis. In exploring how the notion of the French empire overseas was construed and how it was infused with meaning at three different historical moments, 1784, 1835 and 1938, it demonstrates how precarious the French empire was perceived to be, in terms of both European rivalry and resistance from the colonized, and how the rhetoric of a French colonisation douce was pitted against the inscribed excesses of the more powerful British empire. Rather than employing the sorts of recuperative agenda which focus on how the colonized were elided (viz., Subaltern Studies) or on the writings of the formerly colonized (viz., Francophone Studies), the study concerns itself specifically with how French colonialism and imperialism were perceived, and thus offers a further corrective to any generalizations about European colonialism and imperialism. More particularly, by examining how the representational strategy of nostalgia is used in these texts, the study demonstrates how perceived loss, and nostalgia for an imperial past, played a role in dynamically shaping the French colonial enterprise across its various manifestations.

This article develops a critical analysis of the colonial world of the postcolonial historians whose works inadvertently contribute to the process of reconstituting the colonial construction of tribal identities in neoliberal India. The monolithic and colonial construction of tribal identities in postcolonial India reinforces and preserves tribal identities along the lines of the colonial methods of identity formation based on territorialization. The article highlights the problematic features of the territorialization and deterritorialization of tribal identities and their reconstitution. Territorial-based identity formation is now being used and sustained by the neoliberal political and economic ruling and non-ruling elites in order to exploit tribal communities. The existence of upper-caste and class-based Hindu social order is concomitant with a social hierarchy based on the exploitation of tribal communities in India. This article locates the colonial and neoliberal capitalist logic of identity formation that serves elites, and helps to advance the neoliberal political-economic project of the Hindu right. A postmodern logic of identity formation facilitates the expansion of the neoliberal capitalist economy with the process of Hinduization. It contributes to identity formations that divide the people on territorial grounds. The article is divided into four parts. The first outlines the philosophical basis of identity formation and its links with neoliberalism; the second deals with identity formation based on territory; part three documents the debates on tribal identity formation in postcolonial India; and the final part elucidates the capitalist logic inherent in territorial-based identity formations.

Assam, the mother state of Northeast, is the land of tribal communities where more than twenty-three (23) tribal communities have been living from ancient times. Bodo, Karbi, Tiwa, Mising, Deori, Rabha, Dimasa, Hajong etc. are the major tribal communities of Assam. This paper tries to explore the complex process of defining self-identity of the Deori tribe living in Assam, a state of north-east India. The Deori tribe is an indigenous tribal community that have experienced many historical, sociocultural, and political changes during 60-70 years, thus shaping the sense of identity. The approach that draws from sociology, anthropology, and history to find the way involve in the construction, negotiation, and contestation of the Deori identity over time. Through the examination of historical accounts, oral traditions, ceremonial customs, and socio-economic frameworks, the study illuminates the intricate interaction between internal and external elements that have influenced the perception of the self-identity of the Deori tribe. Furthermore, the paper explores the implications of globalisation, modernisation, state policies on the preservation and revival of the cultural identity of Deori tribe. Finally, it delves into the broader discourses on identity formation, indigenous rights, and cultural resilience in contemporary societies. To prepare this paper both historical and explanatory methodologies have been applied by the researchers.

Resources and resourcefulness: Roles, opportunities and risks for women working at artisanal mines in South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Standing up for forest: A case study on Baiga women's mobilization in community governed forests in Central India