The co-construction of whiteness in an MC battle

Arni Brownstone, ed. <i>The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec: A Painted History from the Northern Mixteca</i>. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press and Royal Ontario Museum, 2015. xxiv+190 pp.; 98 color illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 (paper).

إن التنقيبات الأثرية التي جرت في العراق في القرن التاسع عشر الميلادي التي شملت قصور الملوک الآشوريين، کشفت عن عدد کبير من النقوش البارزة المحفورة على لوحات حجرية من المرمر، کانت تزين جدران قاعة العرش، والقاعات المهمة في القصر، حيث کان من أبرزها مشاهد حربية ومشاهد صيد، صورت فيها العديد من الحيوانات، من بينها الغزلان التي هي موضوع دراستنا. إن هذه اللوحات الجدارية، لم تعد اليوم موجودة في أماکنها الأصلية، إنما وزعت على متاحف عديدة من العالم أبرزها: المتحف العراقي في بغداد، المتحف البريطاني في لندن ومتحف اللوفر في باريس. سيشمل بحثنا دراسة لوحتين جداريتين تعودان إلى العصر الآشوري الحديث. أولى هذه اللوحات تعود إلى عصر سرجون الثاني (705 - 721ق.م.)، حيث عثر عليها في قصر خورسباد، وهي محفوظة حاليا في المتحف البريطاني، وقد نقش عليها مشهد صيد يظهر فيه الغزال محمولا على أکتاف الصياد. أما اللوحة الثانية فتعود إلى عصر آشوربانيبال (627 - 668) ق.م.، وقد عثر عليها في القصر الشمالي في نينوى، محفوظة في المتحف البريطاني، تشمل هذه اللوحة على مشاهد عدة من بينها مشهد يصور مجموعة من الغزلان في وضعية المشي خلال مشهد صيد، ومشهد ثان يصور غزلان مصابة بالسهام. سنتناول في هذه الدراسة تحديد نوع الغزلان المصورة وتوثيق تصويرها في هاتين اللوحتين الآشوريتين، ومدى مطابقتهما مع التصاوير الواقعية لهذه الحيوانات في وضعيات مماثلة، وصولا إلى تقويم مدى نجاح الفنان في توثيق الغزلان ، وما الذي ميز الفنان في عصر سرجون الثاني عن الفنان في عصر آشوربانيبال؟ The excavations of Assyrian palaces that took place in Iraq, in the 19th century, revealed many motifs engraved gypsum alabaster slabs that were decorating the throne room and the major halls of the palaces. Most of these motifs illustrate combat scenes or hunting scenes that portray many animals, including deer, which are the focus of our study. These motifs no longer exist in their original places. They are located now in several museums around the world, such as the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad, the British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris. Our research includes a study of two murals dating back to the modern Assyrian era. The first one dates back to the period of Sargon II (721 - 705 BC), where it was found in the Khorsabad Palace and is currently preserved in the British Museum. A hunting scene in which deer appears on the shoulders of the hunter has been engraved it. The second mural dates back to the Ashurbanipal period (668 - 627 BC). It was found in the Northern Palace in Nineveh and also preserved in the British Museum. This painting includes several scenes; one of the scenes portrays a walking group of deer during hunting, and another scene represents deer affected with arrows. In this study, we will address several issues. First, we will determine the type of deer portrayed. Then, we will compare the documentation of deer in the two Assyrian murals. Besides, we will discuss the extent of their conformity with their original appearance in similar real situations. Also, we will check whether the artist succeeded in documenting the deer or not. Finally, we will determine what distinguishes the artist in the period of Sargon II from the artist of the Ashurbanipal period?

IntroductionMigrant health is emerging as an important public health issue. There has been an upsurge in northeast migration to Delhi. The literature brings out racial discrimination and harassment faced by...

This paper analyses language discourse in first-time encounters between young and old women in an African township. Forms of address, stories and complaints are analysed in terms of generational differences and similarities in identity ascription. Young women identify themselves on the basis of their ethnic membership and class, while old women do so on the basis of family relations and implied ethnic membership, which can be gleaned from their name and place of birth or origin. The discourse is marked by frequent complaints by old women to young women about the youth. Some complaints may be interpreted as masked forms of bragging. Old women complain that “they [the youth] talk to us like children,” but their words were initially used by the youth to describe old people. Within their use of language old women try to reinforce traditional power to withstand youth power and to retain some influence, even within non-familial intergenerational encounters.

Tra<i>n</i>stocar, Three Fragments

This study investigates the discursive construction of authenticity among white middle‐class young people in the New York City area who affiliate with hip‐hop. It explores the ways in which hip‐hop mediates the adoption of African American English‐influenced speech by these young people and how this phenomenon complicates traditional sociolinguistic conceptions of identity. There is a discourse within hip‐hop that privileges the urban black street experience. This forces white middle‐class hip‐hoppers whose race and class origins distance them from this socially located space to construct themselves linguistically as authentic via both form and content.

The Gee clan of Houston is the largest and most prominent network of Chinese Americans in Houston. Linked together by a commonly shared last name, Gee (朱), and not always by blood, it is remarkable in that its members actively work to keep the ties strong, especially the younger generation, whose cultural reference is thoroughly American. This article examines how the Gees parlayed the traditional Chinese affinity for associations based on the same surname or place of origin into a hybrid model adapted for maximum efficacy in the new world. Led by a small group of generous and resourceful elders who put down roots in the Bayou city, the Gees rose from humble beginnings, endured the Jim Crow restrictions on non-whites, and attained great social, financial, and political heights. A brief discussion on the migration and assimilation patterns of overseas Chinese offers a conceptual framework with which to understand the settlement process of this remarkable group of individuals. The following stories are derived from interviews in HAAA, and form the basis of a planned in-depth study of the Gee clan.

Memory is an empty plate, scarred by scratches from the knife on its skin. —Ronny Someck, "Baghdad," in The Milk Underground1 In his film Forget Baghdad (2003), Samir aims to compensate for the historical "abyss of abandonment" (Hess 1993:7) that looms between the Zionist official story of Israel and its Iraqi chapter through the intimate and poignant reminiscences of five individuals of Baghdadi origin.2 He does this in part by closing in on the faces of the five "actors"—Shimon Ballas, Moshe Moussa Houri, Sami Michael, Samir Naqqash and Ella Shohat –for whom the film offers permission and a vehicle to travel to their ancestral homeland and, to a certain extent, to the self. What have been, in the Israeli rhetorical climate, spurned fragments in a linear journey—a one-way-ticket to the Promised Land—is transformed into a roundtrip journey, characterized by endless loops and coils. Significantly, the film opens with a top-down view of a man's suited legs walking through an airport; in the background is heard an announcement of the imminent departure of an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Airport sounds merge and then give way to Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil's multicultural jazz instrumental, "Got to Go Home," which is somewhat reminiscent [End Page 133] of the "Pink Panther" theme song. Both the music and the audible display of the film's title and credits, by way of typewritten font, clinch the detective story-like documentary nature of Samir's nearly two-hour film.3 This essay attempts to contribute to increasing the visibility of Baghdad as an originary site of Israeli and US Jewish minorities. In "Forget Baghdad," the hybrid, hyphenated identity of Iraqi-Jews or Arab-Jews is presented within the context of European colonialism and modernity, and situated on the extended cultural map of the Jewish diaspora in the "East" from Baghdad to Teheran and Mumbai. I aim to expand the visual archive of ethnography and its representation beyond "writing culture" or "reading culture" to include viewing as an important aspect of the discursive practices of cultures. Ever since Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the media representation of Iraq and Baghdad has been ideologically veneered by US foreign policy, contributing to an essentialized, Orientalist portrait of what is in reality a finely textured "culturescape." As a visual ethnography that takes memory as its subject, "Forget Baghdad" redresses the tendency to represent Iraq and its Jewish minority culture as abstractions, as a chapter in Jewish history that lacks historical context and legitimacy. It is one thing to return to a place that is associated with violence, collective or personal, and another to return to the place that was forsaken for the hope of a better one. The viewer quickly discovers that Baghdad is a place that invokes both trauma and solace. The trauma of Baghdad inheres in the fact of its exile from Israeli memory, but, as the film underscores, it is only through memory that Baghdad can be recuperated and reclaimed as part of Israeli cultural history. Baghdad appears in the film as a place of origin, a cultural reference, and a genealogy.4 But, as I highlight in this essay, the film is not so much about Baghdad and everyday life there prior to emigration, but about the memory of the city as it is informed by the experience of being Israeli today, fifty-two years or so later. The idea of "going back," therefore, is part of a wider discussion of discursive legitimacy and recently invented strategies to effectively participate in the public debates on ethnicities and cultures of origin.5 The key questions are what kinds of narratives are produced from this cinematic site, and what is the nature of this memory? The main issues at stake are not only the permission to go back, in conjunction with the nostalgic and sentimental value inherent in going back, but...

The issues related to the transformation of Slavic languages at the turn of the 20 th - 21 st centuries are considered. Special attention is paid to the tendencies of enrichment of Bulgarian and Russian languages with phraseological units. The novelty of the study is seen in the fact that for the first time a comparative analysis of dictionaries containing phraseological neologisms is made. The results of a comparison of the sources of phraseological units and their areas of functioning are presented. The author proceeds from the fact that the enrichment of phraseology is subject to two trends - borrowing and updating at the expense of its own reserves. It is established that borrowed phraseological units are represented by calques, semi-calques and units that preserve the original sound appearance. It is emphasized that they function in technical, political, financial, military, sport and other spheres of communication. The author dwells on the differences between Bulgarian and Russian neologisms: Bulgarians have mainly folk and folklore units; Russians have many expressions from synthetic genres of art. The higher productivity of such “suppliers” of neologisms as international political discourse, military and slang spheres in the Russian language, and financial and economic sphere in the Bulgarian language is proved. The relevance of the study is proved by the need to create the Russian-Bulgarian and Bulgarian-Russian dictionaries of phraseological neologisms.

In November and December 1966, the young, predominantly white rock audience on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles battled police over curfew and loitering laws. Both the Strip’s protesters and their critics associated these “Sunset Strip riots” with the Watts uprising of 1965, when Black residents of South Los Angeles resisted police brutality and economic exploitation. White bohemians claimed solidarity with, or perhaps merely appropriated, the moral imperatives of Black protest, while Black critics argued that the mild oppression faced by white teenagers on the Strip was irrelevant to the serious, systemic abuses inflicted on Black communities such as Watts. Yet the Sunset Strip protests also led white activists to consider questions of privilege and authenticity and to make sincere attempts to support Black movements. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s “Trouble Every Day” and “Plastic People,” songs that critically address Watts and the Sunset Strip, respectively, exemplify the complex interplay among political radicalism, racial identity, and musical creativity in the growing counterculture surrounding rock. In the Black Lives Matter era, when many white musicians and their audiences seek to be effective allies in Black struggles, the “Sunset Strip riots” can serve as both inspiration and cautionary tale.

In a scholarly convergence of historiography and anthropology, Danna Levin Rojo's study has achieved what both disciplines have fallen short of: a more profound understanding of the collaboration of Spaniards and Mesoamerican Indians that enabled the conquest and settlement of northern New Spain. She demonstrates that Nuevo México—the vast northern realm, contiguous but not equivalent with the modern state—had to be jointly invented as a “transcultural object of desire” before it could actually be located and colonized (p. 176).Sixteenth-century documents make only scant and passing mention of the participation of legions of indigenous warriors and settlers in colonial projects. So historians have largely avoided speculation on what could have possibly motivated these natives. And the exotic and mythical qualities of postconquest codices such as the Lienzo de Tlaxcala have frustrated anthropologists in assessing their historicity. Levin Rojo offers a comprehensive, encyclopedic survey of documents and codices to ground her central argument—that Nahua origin and migration stories were prime intercultural motivators for colonial expansion north of the Valley of Mexico.The “return to Aztlán” is the major theme of the collaborative Indo-Hispanic project. A deluxe collection of color plates and maps supplements the arguments, but one in particular recapitulates the central thesis. A leaf of the Códice de Tlatelolco (plate 15) illustrates Nahua participation in the Mixtón War and the 1540 expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to Cíbola. Colorfully costumed and well-armed Tlatelolca warriors tower over detailed but diminutive, black-and-white mounted Spanish knights and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza himself. The Spaniards appear as auxiliaries to a clearly indigenous campaign.Levin Rojo sets the preconquest stage with an ethnohistorical overview of the territories where the “quest for Nuevo México” unfolded, explaining how Nahua political organization and local identities emerge from origin and migration narratives. Stories from across Mesoamerica share a common structure: ethnogenesis of a group under a tutelary deity, the north-to-south odyssey in search of a promised land, and the foundational miracle that signified their legitimacy in the new place. The apparition of the eagle, serpent, and cactus of Tenochtitlán is the most famous, but there are other examples.Narratives from dominant colonial discourses draw from another family of myths that underlies European triumphalism. The greatest impediment to assigning indigenous agency in Mexican historiography is what Levin Rojo calls the “medieval hypothesis” of the conquest, first articulated by Enrique de Gandía in the 1920s and prevalent in the rest of the century. This idea that imaginary places like the earthly paradise and Seven Cities of the island of Antillia, populated with Amazons, noble savages, and monstrous creatures, could be as important as the imperial designs of the crown and the ambition for gold and spice was as compelling as it was unquestioned. After a close reading of well- and lesser-known chronicles and diaries, Levin Rojo finds no evidence of the marvelous or of the influence of the medieval hypothesis. Many students of Mexican history still assume the Seven Cities of Cíbola to be a European myth when it actually springs from a commonplace in Mesoamerican origin myths, the seven caves of Chicomóstoc from which emerged seven foundational tribes.Even when scholars like Tzvetan Todorov finally broke through the veil of myth to identify the centrality of European empirical ideology and praxis in the conquest of Mexico, there was still a reluctance to assign any agency at all to the natives. But postconquest, it was the encounter with indigenous thought that enabled the next phase of northern expansion. Such pragmatism was missing from the expeditions prior to the Mexican adventure. Explorers like Christopher Columbus used only deductive reasoning based on textual authority of writings like the journals of Marco Polo, whose place-names, from Cathay and Cipango, were directly imposed on the American landscape.Levin Rojo convincingly deconstructs the most important toponyms in the next phase of colonial expansion, Nueva España and Nuevo México. To name the Mesoamerican heartland after Spain implied more than the conquistador's nostalgia for snowy mountains and temperate climes. Similarities were also social and cultural—cities built of stone and people dressed in woven clothes, engaged in advanced agriculture, and ruled by monarchs, with a complex religion presided over by a hierarchy of priests. The encounter was also an engagement, the proof of which resides in one of the most hybrid and oldest place-names of North America, a Nuevo México in the north with wealthy city-states to be rediscovered. After the conquest of Mexico, Spaniards were profoundly influenced by native worldviews, history, and traditions. Mexican Indians were fascinated by the idea of a return to Aztlán, their place of origin. As expeditions headed north on pre-Hispanic trade and migration routes, the ruins of great cities were found, confirming the historicity of native myths. The Indo-Hispanic collaboration was not just military but also cultural, ideological, and political.

This article analyzes an in situ potato conservation program currently implemented in a richly biodiverse area of Cochabamba, Bolivia, as a form of Foucauldian governance. It argues that the establishment of a “conservation area” for the purposes of the program is facilitated by the re-signification of the place, through the use of a dominant conservation discourse to describe and select it. This re-signification represents what Escobar (1996) calls a “symbolic conquest” of the place and its people, affording the conservation authority—linked to national and international conservation interests—a place in which to enact and extend its worldview. Meanwhile, the conservation area is slowly remoulded into an imaged “place of origin” of the potato varieties of conservation interest. This article suggests that in order to twin environmental conservation with social justice, it is necessary to question the discourses that legitimate conservation and to seek the counter-discourses that are silenced.

From the moment President Donald Trump signed it into effect, the Muslim ban would become the focus of outrage. Thousands gathered at airports across the country to protest the executive order. Lawyers filed challenges. Universities and CEOs issued public condemnations. Earlier that same week, the President signed another executive order, calling for the creation of a massive deportation force which, within a few months, rounded up hundreds of thousand of undocumented immigrants, terrorizing millions more. Another executive order halved the number of refugees annually admitted to the country and cancelled the protected status previously extended to displaced Haitians and Central Americans. Those orders generated far less outrage, few protests, no corporate press releases. Why does the Muslim ban seem to betray “everything we stand for,” as Dick Cheney announced, while the other orders are received with relative complacence? This essay attempts to answer that question by tracing a set of shifts in the rhetorical norms and legal architecture governing immigration law and policy over the past century. The controversial enactment of the Muslim ban is particularly resonant with failed attempts to pass a “Hindu” ban, almost exactly one hundred years before. Constrained by a shift in global norms governing racial discourse, Congress hoping to exclude Indian immigrants from the United States eventually succeeded in passing a law to exclude “Hindus” not “by name” but through the invention of a geographic designation, the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” In the post-colonial era, the exclusion of immigrants on the basis of racial identity is no longer tolerable, but the exclusion of immigrants on the basis of nationality or place of origin has become entirely normative—as the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Muslim ban demonstrates.

Reviewed by: Staging Indigenous Heritage: Instrumentalisation, Brokerage, and Representation in Malaysia by Cai Yunci Janet Pillai Staging Indigenous Heritage: Instrumentalisation, Brokerage, and Representation in Malaysia. by CAI YUNCI. New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. 244pp. ISBN 9780429053627. This monograph stands out for its contribution to expanding the literature on indigenous museology from a Southeast-Asian perspective. In this study the author surfaces critical conversations on museology, cultural heritage and the mobilization of UNESCO's culture for development rhetoric through an ethnographic study of four community-based cultural villages in east and peninsular Malaysia. The four 'living museums' are touted as community-based cultural heritage projects intended to conserve and sustain living traditions and customs and contribute to the socio-economic well-being of indigenous groups. Using grounded case studies Cai Yunci exposes contradictory realities—how these museums represent a post-colonial reconfiguration of the state's relationship with indigenous minorities and are in fact sites of negotiation and contestation where the dynamics of representation, self-determinism, identity and sustainability are complicated by the differing interests and motivations of several stakeholders (communities, sponsors, mediators/brokers, curators, landowners, audiences) involved in setting up, managing and operating the museums. Readers are persuaded to rethink the politics of representation and of museology by the methodical approach taken by the author. The monograph opens with a well referenced and up-to-date literature review on the changing notions of concepts such as culture, cultural heritage, culture for development, indigeneity and museology. The author strongly suggests the need to adopt critical museology, an approach which recognizes that cultural institutions such as museums are subject to specific geographies and histories which cannot be segregated from wider social, political and economic relations. Cai devotes a chapter to uncover the early historical conceptualization and classification of indigeneity in Malaysia and how it has been influenced by colonial thought and politics, in the form of race discourse, ethnography and censuses, evolutionary principles, cultural protectionism and [End Page 234] integration policies. Cai also presents newer counter developments in indigenous political activism and shared consciousness that have arisen as a response to issues of marginalization and status reclassification, encroachment of customary land and resources, environmentalism and the rise of transnational indigenous rights movements. Following the examination of the historical conception of indigeneity at the macro level is an examination of how indigeneity is conceptualized, curated and consumed at the micro level through cultural museums. The case studies provide well-researched information on the founding, development and organization of the four cultural villages and reveal differing perspectives held by contesting stakeholders on the impact and effect of these cultural projects. In particular the case studies highlight the concepts of cultural brokerage and cultural enterprise and commodification that characterize the Malaysian projects. The case studies demonstrate how indigenous cultural practice has been displaced from its place of origin; how beneficiary groups have been reduced to a culture of dependency on the brokers and museums; how self-determinism is denied due to lack of trust; and how the staging of cultural heritage has resulted in the modification, reinvention or reframing of cultural attributes. By contextualizing how the dynamics and notions of indigeneity at the macro level affect indigenous representation at a micro level, the author exposes the complexities that need to be considered in museology and the importance of maintaining a critical and reflexive attitude towards toward place, time, and constituencies. Southeast Asian museums need to reconsider the rights and obligation of the community in matters of curation, operation, and management, to recognize community agency and authority on what they deem appropriate, sensitive, and accurate, as well as acknowledge that indigenous cultures are not merely rooted in locality but are also subject to the pressures of modernization and globalization. Janet Pillai Independent Scholar and Resource Person Copyright © 2021 Malaysian Branch of The Royal Asiatic Society

Reviews 271 British Library, 2014]). Other censors were simple bureaucrats, and at least one, apparently, exploited his position to read pornographic books before banning them. Even if some censorship is defensible, however, such ‘Bevormundung’, as Bachleitner calls it, is hardly the way to create a mature and enlightened public. It also makes prohibited works seem excessively attractive. Revealingly, censors objected to popular fiction about robbers, ghosts, and so on, because they stimulated the imagination (‘weil sie nur “die Einbildungskraft spannen und beschäftigen”’, p. 104). A more cynical policy would have encouraged adventure fiction to divert people from thinking about real discontents. The case studies partly confirm expectations. They show that negative remarks about Catholicism, whether in Schiller or Fenimore Cooper, led to prohibitions. Pleas for religious toleration were inadmissible: Nathan der Weise and Goethe’s Brief des Pastors von *** an den neuen Pastor zu *** were banned. We also learn something about eighteenth-century reading practices. Wieland’s Agathon incurred disapproval even from the sophisticated van Swieten because of Hippias’s defence of materialism, even though the context shows that Wieland intends his philosophy to seem tempting but reprehensible. Particularly instructive is the case of Werther. It was banned on publication because it might encourage suicide (and there is strong though not conclusive evidence that it did prompt several suicides). In 1786 the ban was lifted, on the grounds that people were less likely to commit suicide from unrequited love than because they were hopelessly in debt or afraid of being punished for fraud, but in 1803 the ban was restored. Bachleitner argues that the habit of reading saints’ lives with a view to imitatio transferred itself to secular literature, supported by the new eighteenth-century practice of empathetic reading. One might extrapolate to the conclusion that the concept of specifically aesthetic experience was only gradually developing. These are just a few of the rewards to be gleaned from this rich and amply documented study. Ritchie Robertson The Queen’s College, Oxford Handbuch der deutschen Literatur Prags und der Böhmischen Länder. Ed. by Peter Becher, Steffen Höhne, Jörg Krappmann and Manfred Weinberg. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017. 445 pp. Hardback €102.80; ebook €69.95. ISBN 978–3476 –02579–1. It is probably apt to say at the outset that this handbook has an extremely ambitious goal: to do justice to the complexities and intricacies of such rich and diverse a literary landscape across long periods of gradual change as well as the most radical of historical caesuras. The ‘Bohemian lands’ of the title are defined as the area traditionally belonging to the Bohemian crown, namely the kingdom of Bohemia, the margraviate of Moravia and the individual territories of the formerly Polish duchy of Silesia (Přemysl) which became Bohemian vassals during the late Middle Ages. Lusatia and the Silesian duchies seized by Prussia in the First Silesian War (1740–42) do not feature in this volume. The Reviews 272 periods covered are thus the era of Habsburg rule over Bohemian lands since the age of Enlightenment, the Czechoslovak Republic 1918–38 and the Nazi period following German annexation of the Sudetenland and the formation of a Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia. As a ‘Nachklang’, remnants of Bohemian German culture after 1945 inside and outside communist Czechoslovakia receive due consideration. This temporal restriction is appropriate as it allows concentration on significant modern developments such as the formation of ‘national’ literatures in the context of emerging modern societies, the configuration around distinct political entities with (multiple) centres and peripheries, and the investigation of these areas’ relationships with external cultural reference points such as the metropoles of German-speaking central Europe. The list of authors at the end of the volume (pp. 418–27) gives an impression of the scale of the task. It comprises close to 700 names including authors who left the region early and made a reputation for themselves elsewhere (such as Rilke and Werfel), authors whose work seems intimately linked to their place of origin but in a manner difficult to define (such as Franz Kafka), authors who were not native to the area, but whose work reflects its conditions and characteristics (such as Ferdinand von Saar...