Ambivalent Space Research Articles

Building professionalism in early childhood development in South Africa: professional associations and unions

ABSTRACT Early childhood development (ECD), from birth to 6, occupies an ambivalent space within a system ranging from birth to 9. Professional Early Childhood Development Associations and Unions (ECDAUs) are important structures to elevate early learning issues in the context of building quality ECD systems. This article explores issues that ECDAUs encountered in the South African context as they struggled to build professionalism. Socially constructed notions of professionalism and ideas from transformative politics provided the theoretical lenses for the study. Six participants from four associations and one union participated in the study. The findings show that although ECDAUs actively build professionalism, they remain fragile structures in multi-dimensional, complex and rapidly transforming environments. There are attempts to consolidate efforts to move the professionalism/ECD agenda forward. This thrust, however, is stronger from ECD associations than from the union, which still needs to incorporate ECD for 5 to 6 year-olds in its work.

“It’s not a convention book for damsels”: Literature and Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century An Example from Feminal

Based on a specific case: a Luís Via review of Caires vius by Víctor Català (pseudonym of Caterina Albert i Paradís) published in 1907 in the Catalan magazine Feminal, this article aims to review two broader issues from the field of literary criticism with a gender perspective: first, the role of women’s magazines as an ambivalent space – alternative, but also ‘subaltern’ – in relation to a literary and publishing system characterized by male dominance; second, the ways in which the admission of women’s writing emerges as tension within this field of forces situated astride the nineteenth and twentieth century.

“I have not a word about my own sensations”: Intoxication, Trauma and Imperialism in The Moonstone

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between intoxication, trauma, and imperialism in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, exploring how altered states of consciousness recuperate and repress the shameful secrets of colonial history. Throughout the novel, the characters attempt to explicate the violence of empire by retracing the past through textual fragments, such as journals, letters, and diary-entries. However, in doing so, they succumb to quasi-narcotic states of unconscious cerebration, psychic repression, and automatic action. As such, the process of detection becomes a painful, and even traumatic, experience in which psychical information is forgotten, yet never erased. Thus, while the novel attempts to formulate a critique of the British Empire, its critical voice remains regulated by the psychosomatic logic at work, simultaneously concealing and revealing the traumas of colonial dispossession. Drawing upon the work of Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, Jill Matus, and other contemporary trauma theorists, as well as Victorian theories of addiction, unconscious memory, and psychic shock, this article suggests that while Collins frames the imperial project as both “trauma” and “intoxication,” demonstrating how political violence creates a disturbance in memory and consciousness, the novel occupies an ideologically ambivalent space, unable to assimilate fully the horrors of British imperialism.

Remembrance and ritual in English schools

AbstractThis article explores war remembrance and ritual in English schools. The Remembrance in Schools project (2013–2020) investigated remembrance practices in schools in England through questionnaires, interviews and observations. Schools are unique as sites of remembrance because children constitute the majority of participants in rituals. School‐based rituals of remembrance might potentially reproduce dominant discourses of war‐normalisation that conflate military values and nationalism with morally ‘good’ values and an imagined community of the nation. They also provide a contested, ambivalent space in which ambiguities of practice and thinking may encourage the emergence, in small ways, of counter‐narratives about war and its remembrance.

The Inconstant Gardener: Exile, Madness, and the Postcolonial Subject in Bessie Head s A Question of Power

Gardens are a complex meeting place of nature and culture, shaped simultaneously by the natural resources and environmental limitations of the land and by the social, political, economic, and historical values and possibilities exploited by those who fashion and tend them. In Bessie Head’s A Question of Power(1974), the protagonist seeks out, in her garden, a restorative ground for resolution and progress; yet the same space stages uncomfortable encounters animated by hierarchies of power and acts of misappropriation. Through discussion of community gardens and cultural notions of uprootedness, I argue that the community garden is a site of economic security, cultural independence, and social belonging. The protagonist, an exile suffering from psychotic hallucinations, gains from the garden a means of grounding and rooting herself in a new land, countering narratives of uprootedness, estrangement, and illness. Yet, moving away from the purely redemptive and reparative readings of the garden, I argue that thegarden remains an ambivalent space nourished by the co-existence of incongruous histories and identities, where progress is unsteady, inharmonious, and uncanny. To plant a garden is ultimately not to produce a world beholden to the gardener’s will but to cultivate a space in which the gardener comes to realize their own entangled position among others.

Liberal Democracy and Social Economic Development: Sub-Regional Comparison 1940-2020

The link between liberal democracy and social economic development is still a subject of debate. Findings from country-based analyses compared to those based on specific factors at multiregional and global sizes are mixed. By focusing on objects based on sub-region analysis, this study contributes to the effort of connecting the common thread and narrowing the ambivalent space. This study reveals that across seven sub-regions with diverse experiences of liberal democracy, only has a substantial effect on social economic growth, and vice versa, in regions that have experienced liberal democracy for less than ten years.

Accomplice Neighborhood: Everyday Life Politics

This paper delves into the conceptual delineation of the institution of the neighborhood as a catalyst for innovative political discourse and practice. It aims to set the basis for an upcoming reevaluation of the work of Andrés Ortiz-Osés, pioneer of Gadamerian hermeneutics in Spain, considering the neighborhood’s potential: its co-implicated and co-implicative nature connects consistently with his symbolic hermeneutics of the sense. The neighborhood, a complex institution transcending conventional affiliations, underpins coexistence, mutual tolerance, and a kind of ethical dialogue. This work contributes to highlighting the neighborhood’s political dimensions on its own and claims its philosophical relevance beyond its traditional understanding. The ambivalent space of vicinity promotes plural speech and serves as a vital agora, fostering dynamic, ethical coexistence and engaged citizenship, thereby enhancing the democratic landscape.

TRANSGRESSIVE LANGUAGE OF POSTMODERNIST AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING: INTERTEXT AND METALEPSIS

Background. Intertext and metalepsis in the proposed study are considered as the phenomena of transgressive poetics, means of creating the ontological dimension of an artistic text and tools for textualization of life. Transgressive language contributes to the correction of preconceived notions about postmodernism, facilitate the disclosure of changing nature of autobiography by revealing and analyzing internal contradictions − the amphibology of meaning. Self-generated paradoxes are revealed in the pluralized text due to metalepsis that registered dissolving borders between the levels of narration − author (reality), narrator (extra-diegetic), narratee (intra-diegetic) and intertextuality that creates an ambivalent space for co-existing multilayered experiences . The pronouns «I», «he», «they», constantly alternating, refer to each other, preventing the re-creation of an unambiguous original signified, i.e. a real biographical author who created an autobiographical text − the basis of the genre of autobiography. 
 The purpose of the article is to analyze the role of intertext and metalepsis in creating an autobiographically transgressive text on the example of a novel by the postmodernist writer Stephen Dixon.
 Methods. The poststructuralist approach in the context of literary theory along with elements of intertextual, narrative, stylistic analysis was used. 
 Results. The study of the peculiarities of transgressive language in the autobiographical postmodernist writing shows that Dixon's I-texts are sustained in the parameters of a classic novel: there is neither hypertextuality nor open polemical intertextuality. However, the transformation of the artistic matter of literature and the nature of autobiography is multifaceted and noted at all levels of the text. 
 Discussion. Dixon’s innovations lie in the further transformation of the modus of the author's presence, begun by Modernists. The artistic strategy of transgression of the experience of classical autobiography, applied by Dixon, is embodied in using the reconceptualized stylistic devices. One of them is ontological metalepsis that reveals transgressive dynamics on all levels of artistic conventions and, above all, the boundaries of fiction and reality in the act of creativity. The representative texts of the American writer reveal the growing sense of the thinning line between language and reality in the autobiographical prose of recent decades. This is accompanied by the development of innovative breakthroughs to reflect one's life experience, dictated by the existential need to restore ties with the material, which runs into the ambivalence of language structures.

The Cosmopolitan Stranger in Muriel Spark’s The Finishing School

Abstract This paper aims to offer a critical discussion of the representation of the cosmopolitan stranger (Marotta 2010) in Muriel Spark’s last novel, The Finishing School (2004). A category taken from the social sciences, mostly from the work of G. Simmel and Z. Bauman, the stranger as a literary figure has been associated with binary modes of relationship, whose versatile presence is usually responsible for destabilising socio-cultural spaces through his/her permeability and ambivalence. This notion will provide a valuable background for a better understanding of the game of doubles played in Spark’s novel through which the author challenges binary logic in character development and trespasses symbolic boundaries involving the encounter of otherness and a re-evaluation of the self. Our study re-examines Spark’s avant-gardism and foresight in her perception of a figure who reflects contemporary, multiple, playful and hybrid identities, one who may occupy this interstitial and ambivalent space which problematises social and cultural boundaries as unstable and permeable rather than reinforcing them. It adds a new perspective on Spark’s final novel which, as most of her later ones, may be said to be permeated by a sense of hybridity as a synonym for completeness, and a yearning for transition by implying the acceptance of new forms of interpretation and in-between spaces where fictional representation is negotiated and the intersection of opposites may enhance the inherent duality of existence.1

Religion and the Protest Movement

This article analyzes the position of the Christian churches on the protests in Belarus in 2020. This study contributes to the research on the state-society relationship in autocratic regimes by nuancing the thesis that civil society is either marginalized or fully co-opted by the authoritarian state. The protest wave showed that the initiatives of religious groups fostered collective action in a state system that is punitive of any dissent. The article identifies churches as an ambivalent space: one where the state can exercise social control, but where potential resistance to the repressive state might also occur since they enjoy a greater degree of freedom than other organizations in authoritarian Belarus. Moreover, our study argues that religion can be seen as a privileged arena of protest within existing legal frameworks of the “contract” between the state and the church. By looking at the societal engagement of different religious confessions campaigning for their rights and promoting their visions of desirable political development on the grassroots level, this article addresses a range of opportunities to engage in civic activism in Belarus.

글로벌 시대의 서발턴: 제3세계 여성난민들

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee are refugee novels set in different regions and cultures; however, they both expose the subaltern status of refugee women from the Third World. The protagonists of both works are two refugee women, Nadia and Jangmi, who, as women, are hopeful for sexual liberation and the liberation of the First World. However, while they are only viewed as vulnerable subjects and victims of local patriarchy, their other identity as refugees from the Third World lacks agency and suffers from alienation when they are subjected to prejudices against refugees. In other words, the new society is an ambivalent space for them that, on the one hand, affords them as women to enjoy greater sexual liberation and freedom than the society they came from. On the other hand, as refugees from Third World countries, however, they are expected to remain mute in the face of discrimination, prejudiced language, and hostile looks. To avoid experiencing worst-case scenarios such as deportation, their best option is to express inexhaustible gratitude for what they have been given and strive to be flawlessly assimilated subjects, while ignoring their refugee identity, which suffers from injustice. Being exposed to the dilemma of having to live with their divided selves and being unable to speak about their problems, Nadia and Jangmi share the question Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raised about the Third World woman: Can the subaltern speak? This paper endeavors to contextualize the refugee experiences of Nadia and Jangmi in relation to Spivak’s question about the Third World woman. The paper will then contend that refugee women from the Third World are invisible subalterns as the symbol of the world’s inequality which still exists in the so-called more equally globalized world.

Politics of ambivalence: how Zhou Shen’s androgyny survives under Xi Jinping

ABSTRACT Since the recent state crackdown on effeminate stars labeled as niangpao (sissy pants), “insufficient” masculinity has once again become a focus of political controversy in China. Among these stars, Zhou Shen, a male pop singer known for his feminized voice and image, continues to enjoy immense popularity and perform in official programs. His growing fame and tolerance by the state call into question his cultural-political strategy. Conceptualizing Zhou’s androgynous performance as a political effect of a series of co-optation, compromises and negotiations, this essay offers a contextualized reading of the complex ways in which competing and contradictory influences shape his expression. In tracing the practices that configure his stardom, we investigate how Zhou’s androgyny paradoxically reaffirms and unsettles hegemonic norms in non-antagonistic ways. We describe how his engagement with Xi Jinping’s China Dream creates an ambivalent space for negotiating established norms. We argue that Zhou’s phenomenal success rests with the fusion of contradictory elements into his performances and his ability to cut across binary classifications. This process has nurtured a politics of ambivalence marked by ambiguity, confusion and contingency. It also sheds light on the limit and possibility of doing gender politics in an increasingly illiberal setting.

Subjects of Aspirations

Abstract Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Gracias a Dios, an urban informal settlement in the Pacific region of Nicaragua, this article examines the mechanisms by which investments in Sandinista partisan politics are reproduced even as promises of redistribution made by the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front are chronically deferred. Populist governance emerges as the administration of aspirations in the gap between the populist promise and its failure. The residents of Gracias a Dios, who are presumed to be invested in Sandinista politics either by ideological interpellation or pragmatic self-interest, are revealed to be neither deceived nor blindly hopeful. This article argues that the populist promise opens an ambivalent space that animates aspirations and preserves possibility even when experience suggests otherwise. The regime's capacity to foster possibility in lieu of probability is dependent on punctuating everyday life with irregularly timed interventions and on transforming partisan belonging into a stopgap between promise and outcome.

Violence, Vulnerability, and Resilience in <i>Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora</i>

Narratives that take shape against the backdrop of political flashpoints such as Kashmir, represent women occupying an ambivalent space where appropriation and resistance exist simultaneously. While their resistance against oppression evokes a sense of surprise and admiration, their passive appropriation within power hegemonies creates a sense of despondency and despair. A Kashmiri woman has shown great amount of resilience in fighting the atrocities in life. The brutal fate to which she is accustomed makes her stronger and more independent. Be it an individual political representative, a half widow, or a rape survivor, a Kashmiri woman who has attempted to give voice to her trauma through various media, has always been perceived as a victim. She bears the brunt of violence both from within and outside the state and becomes the site of violence and its absorption at the same time. This paper uses Suniya S. Luthar’s and Dante Cicchetti’s idea of “resilience as a two-dimensional construct concerning the exposure of adversity and the positive adjustment outcomes of that adversity” as a critical gaze to analyze Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora by Esrar Batool, Ifra Butt, et al. in order to foreground and deconstruct this double victimhood of Kashmiri woman. The paper attempts to find how a Kashmiri woman suffers and at the same time shows positive resilience in the face of adversity and loss.

Locked in Liminality. Angst und Methode in der Krisenerfahrung der Gegenwart

Against the backdrop of proclamations of a society of fear, risk and panic from the late 1970s to the present, the article takes a lead from fears as productive agents within the ethnographic process. Through the focal lens of pandemic everyday experience, and deploying essayistic ways of thinking and writing, it draws attention to the intersubjective and intercorporeal practice of meaning-making as conceptualised in phenomenology, psychoanalysis and pragmatist semiotics, and outlines its relevance for emergent interpretation and reflexivity. On an interactive micro-level, the essay explores the moment of ‘in-between’ that is sparked by surprise or crisis, and opens a transient ‘third milieu’ where experience can be shared, whilst cultural meaning is in ongoing renegotiation. The idea of this ambivalent space, as marked by indeterminate creative possibilities merging with fear and uncertainty, is followed further through Corona communication and narration, and investigated in its ambiguous effects of consolidating agency, and perpetuating anxiety and ideological exclusion by way of paranoid ‘infection’. The article inquires into the dynamic conceptual potentials of liminality theory, which it transgresses towards a late-capitalist state of permanent exception: What happens when everyday actors find themselves overpowered by paradoxical emotional requirements that cannot be resolved into new sociality? How can ethnographers, with view to their own involvement into the meshes of everyday fears, retain an empathic, yet empirically grounded understanding of pandemic experience and beyond?

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ <i>Life in the Iron Mills</i>

Sissy Lessons

Sissy Lessons

“Making something new”: rethinking genre in the end times

ABSTRACT Rhetorical Genre Studies has been a productive subfield of communication studies since the 1980s, with the conceptualization of “apocalyptic” as a genre being one influential outcome. Literature on the topic has explored apocalypse as a genre arising to make sense of destabilizing events that fit within no pre-existing symbolic framework. I join this conversation with a slight shift in focus, from the genre itself to the destabilization that occasions it and its potential for rhetorical invention. Picking up on Lauren Berlant’s theorization of the “genre flail,” I argue that the flail can be an ambivalent and productive rhetorical space where reparative and radical rhetorics may gain ground in addition to or beyond apocalyptic and violent alternatives. My case study in end times here is the global climate crisis as depicted in the 2018 film Annihilation. Through rhetorical analysis of the film’s mixed-genre style and ambivalent narrative, I define two possible readings of the film: as diagnostic and as social ecology. These dual readings demonstrate the creativity of genre flail, its potential as a rhetorical zone of innovation, and the importance of interrogating the destructive and reparative genres of practice it produces as potential ways of living-with environmental end times.

Over the corporate rainbow: LGBTQ film festivals and affective media networks

ABSTRACT Contemporary LGBTQ film festivals are often held to a standard of nostalgic radicalism based in U.S. independent film cultures of the early nineties, and found diluted and assimilationist as a result. In an effort to track the complex circulation of affect still present within LGBTQ film festivals, this article troubles this critique of commodification and investigates the networking of LGBTQ film festival affect amongst contexts of significant socio-historical importance like group belonging, pride, and activism. I offer the concept affective media network to consider the organization of public feeling emergent from the negotiated emotional orientation attendees experience through films, corporate installations, and various festival events, each with differing relationships to LGBTQ history. Reading festivals as affective media networks allows us to see them as the unique public spheres they are – mediated spaces of community, ritual, and history that reflect the desires of a specific place and time. Using participant observation methodologies, I focus on Outfest, the premiere LGBTQ film festival in Los Angeles. Paying particular attention to the aggregate of Outfest’s rainbow iconography, and its curation of programmed space, I frame the LGBTQ film festival as an ambivalent space mediating nostalgia for the past against the hope of the future.

Особенности моделирования художественного пространства в сказке Софьи Прокофьевой «Королевство семи озёр»

The features of modeling artistic space in Sofia Prokofieva’s fairy tale “Kingdom of Seven Lakes” (2004) are interpreted. The interaction of parallel worlds – real and fairytale – takes place in a fairy tale through dynamic metamorphoses of space: an uninhabited house turns out to be a portal to a magical land, a mysterious staircase is a path to an unknown world. In “Kingdom of Seven Lakes”, one of the ways to model space is the complete disappearance of real coordinates and the miraculous appearance of a new world from “nowhere”. Spatial characteristics and metamorphoses of the fairy tale space, the mythologeme of the ladder and the key, the opposition of horizontal – vertical, disappearance – appearance, openness – isolation, infinity – limitation, the coordinates of the demonic and heavenly worlds in Prokofiev’s work are subject to the movement of ethical thought. The downward movement, on the one hand, carries the semantics of growing danger, fear, doom, approaching death, on the other hand, it marks a magical transition into a fairy tale and back into the real world. The vertical – horizontal dialectics represents the motive of the main character’s journey in his movement towards an unknown goal. The adventures of the protagonist in the fairy tale universe with its spatial dynamics and the growing tension of struggle and movement determine Alyoshka’s actions, which require mercy, patience and courage from him and ultimately led to the salvation of the wonderful kingdom. His journey through the fabulous lakes symbolizes certain stages of the character’s spiritual path. The space of Evidentis Castle has a special status in the fairy tale. In the work there is an implicit opposition of heaven and hell, which has spatial characteristics. The sulfur lake, both in its name and in appearance (lack of air and in general real space in it, all-burning fire) marks a hellish place, while the revived royal castle of Evidentis appears as an image of universal happiness, love and unceasing fun, an eternal feast in divine bosom. Modeling of multidimensional and ambivalent space has a great discursive significance in the “Kingdom of Seven Lakes” and makes it possible to realize in the fairy tale the most important motif of the path – the path of growing up, knowing the world and self-knowledge of the young character, finding the higher meanings of being.