Assertion Of Identity Research Articles

Decolonizing Dialogues: Sport, Resistance, and Australian Aboriginal Settlements

Abstract This paper seeks to extend understandings of Australian Aboriginal sport history by arguing that sport constituted a site of resistance for Aboriginal athletes in controlled settlements. While examples of overt resistance are rare, opportunities for covert, everyday resistance abounded. For activities performed beyond the notice of settlement administrators provided safe spaces for identity assertion and for expression of anger, dissatisfaction, grievance, unhappiness, or other sense of injustice. Sport, although publicly performed, was a potential site for acts of everyday resistance. This paper explores resistance through oppositional acts of stealing, drinking, and playing-to-rule, which are explored through “hidden transcripts. “ Research for this paper focuses on Queensland, a state with a uniquely odious record on Aboriginal affairs. By focusing on sport as a site of resistance, it offers new insight into the sociocultural practice and meanings of sport in Aboriginal communities historically and, more broadly, on decolonizing sport history.

Nostalgic diaspora or diasporic nostalgia? Discursive and identity constructions of Greeks in Qatar

This paper deals with the discursive constructions of transformative, agentive and creative ethnolinguistic self-conceptualizations and positionings of some select members of the approximately 3000-member Greek diasporic community in the State of Qatar. It is a digital and linguistic ethnographic study focusing on the linguistic and semiotic ways whereby Greeks in Qatar negotiate, challenge, process and ultimately respond to the sociopolitical and cultural narratives that constitute “nostalgia,” namely remembrance and homesickness for Greece. The main argument put forward is that multimodal and translanguaging group styling is employed for the construction of diasporic nostalgia discourse, and the assertion of nostalgic diasporic identities, which in unison construct community membership anew all the time. Nostalgia, as a constructed discourse with (in)authenticity-related spatiotemporal dimensions, and diaspora, as a web of creatively styled sociolinguistic and semiotic identities, are two concepts found in tension primarily due to the contextual precarity Greeks in Qatar live in. The paper contributes empirical and methodological knowledge to the field of language and identity in diaspora by focusing on an under-researched diasporic group, and by employing an emic ethnographic perspective in its discursive and sociolinguistic practices.

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

How do you ‘know’ a tribal when you see one? How do you ‘see’ a tribal when you know one?

This article considers the formation of anthropological knowledge and ethnographic implications in the course of understanding and framing the category of ‘tribe’ on Andaman Nicobar Islands. Considering events from colonial and post-colonial histories of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the article argues that the process of classification and reclassification, motivated by anthropological knowledge and the drive for welfare, creates a discourse that tends to deny cultural and social differentiation or diversity among the various tribal communities that inhabit different parts of the Island archipelago. Statist definitions in other words serve to reduce the conditions and identities of tribal groups into categories of the ‘primitive’, ‘particularly vulnerable’ or presently as just ‘vulnerable’. While such categorisations may have its uses in the allocation of welfare budgets, the sole focus on the category of ‘vulnerability’ obfuscates a more nuanced understanding of the conditions of life and well being among such communities. The article asks if our ‘categorising impulse’ restrains us from thinking of and problematising questions of ‘agency’ in the self-description and assertion of tribal identities. Why is it that the state or the non-tribal outsider remains indifferent to the deconstruction of the statist category of the ‘vulnerable’? Could the discourse of the ‘changeless de- historicised’ Andaman islander suit the ‘non- tribal’ status quo in the Islands?

Incipient Musings on Theory and Formation of Modern Korean Digraphia

This article explores modern Korean digraphia, its chracteristics, duality and formation. The author posits that the essential axis of argumentation of the Korean digraphic debate related to the applications of Chinese characters and Korean phonetic script was formed by the early part of the twentieth century, and would be recapitulated in the two Koreas against the backdrop of post-colonial metanarration and Cold War politics. The author asserts that the functional and synchronic nature of modern Korean digraphia was formed under the influence of the Lyotardian modernity emancipation and speculative (science) metanarratives, as well as the discourse of modern Korean nationalism, which synchronically formed in the Korean assertion of national identity and idependence, during Koreaʼs struggle against imperialism.

Adolescents and Body Modification for Gender Identity Expression.

As a matter of ethics and law, adults enjoy wide berth in securing hormonal and surgical interventions to align their bodies with their desired gender appearance. In contrast, the exercise of choice by minors is more constrained, because they can be less well situated to grasp the nature and consequences of interventions having life-long effects. Even so, some minors hope for body modifications prior to adulthood. Starting very young, some minors may assert atypical gender identity: those with female-typical bodies assert a male identity and those with male-typical bodies assert a female identity. This assertion of identity is atypical only in a descriptive sense, because it is uncharacteristic, not because it is normatively unacceptable. Not all minors persist in their atypical gender identities, but some do. For those who do, it is desirable to minimize unwanted secondary sex characteristics and to maximize desired secondary sex characteristics. I outline here a theory of respect for decisions by minors in regard to hormonal and surgical interventions that help align their bodies with their gender identity. Of particular ethical interest here are body modifications for fertility preservation since certain interventions in the body can leave people unable to have genetically related children. In general, I will show that the degree of respect owed to minors in regard to body modifications for gender identity expression should be scaled according to their decision-making capacities, in the context of robust practices of informed consent.

The “Misura Aurea” of Italian Cooking: Defining Authentic Foods for Locals and Tourists in Postwar Italy, 1953 to 1974

ABSTRACTThe growth of postwar mass tourism in Italy drove the assertion of Italian identity through so- called authentic foods. I follow the actions of culinary societies alongside private and government tourism promoters, arguing that the history of “true” Italian food reveals the contradictory results of globalization as it related to reactions to Americanization. Discourses of genuine Italian cuisine managed by the Accademia Italiana della Cucina in particular relied on the market as a site of cultural production and borrowed its logic of standardization to guarantee quality. Postwar efforts codifying Bologna’s traditional cuisine and promoting it as a culinary destination demonstrates the challenge of democratizing discourses of food and identity and affirm the role negotiations of power have played in defining Italian food.

‘Between underground and over ground: narratives on the identity of women insurgents in Assam’

ABSTRACTThe Assam Movement (1979–1985) has been a turning point in the politics of Assam in India that has raised the question of identity and at the same time triggered the struggle to self-determination by the insurgent organization United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). This paper aims to take identity as the point of departure to mark the transition of women’s role from the Assam Movement into their underground roles in ULFA. In such narratives of hero-making and patriotism, under-representation of women’s strategic involvement and self-sacrifices in the insurgent outfit often leaves the lives of the women members misrepresented and fails to highlight the in-betweens of life and death. This paper pushes the idea of identity assertion in Northeast India beyond citizenship and questions the way women’s presence in the insurgent organization gets narrated, documented, and established. Oral histories are crucial sources of data for this study.

Quest for Egalitarian Socio- spiritual Order: Lingayats and Their Practices

The Lingayat movement led by Basava, Allama, Mahadevi and many others in Karnataka in the twelfth century stands as one of the important movements that challenged, protested and, to a major extent, succeeded in unseating the social supremacy of the upper strata of the society. However, this tradition of egalitarian ideals is waning away from the followers of the Lingayat movement. It is observed that the superficial practices among the many followers of this movement do not have philosophical sanctity. These practices make the followers of the Lingayat movement almost a prototype of Hindu orthodoxy and question their claims of being different. Contradictions and confusion, in the understanding of the community’s ideals by the followers, may put the community in a sort of cultural crisis. The state of practice of ideals among the followers could be understood in terms of their assertions of caste and sub-caste identity; the demand for a separate religious identity on the basis of unique cultural beliefs; and confusing and contradictory political orientations.

The First Step to a Nation? The Irish Postal Service and the Home Rule Crisis

AbstractThis article examines the fate of the proposition in the original third Home Rule bill of 1912 to grant control of the Post Office to the Irish government and the implications this had on debates about the future government of Ireland. It places this within the broader context of calls made by Irish Nationalists for control of the Post Office, disagreements between the Gaelic League and the Post Office, and the choice of the GPO as a rebel target in 1916. A reading of the debates at a parliamentary and popular level reveals wider concerns about the nature of the Home Rule settlement, threats to imperial authority, status, security and financial interests and Ulster. It discusses how national identity and aspirations for sovereignty were expressed through control over this symbolic, vital organ of the state. A study of the Post Office reveals much about communications, questions of patronage and employment and how the state in the nineteenth century became more engaged in people's lives. The fate of the Post Office in Ireland reflected the country's fate. That the Home Rule act of 1914 was suspended during the course of the war and never came into operation opened up possibilities for alternative action. Irish Nationalists understood the importance of institutions for the building of national character. As a space of power, the GPO in Dublin was a physical expression of the British state in Ireland. Its choice as a rebel target in 1916 was a key assertion of identity, power and nation.

Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher

Reviewed by: Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher Ben Etherington Decolonizing Dialectics By George Ciccariello-Maher. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. At heart, George Ciccariello-Maher's Decolonizing Dialectics is a study of political identity. The three thinkers on whom he focuses each confront the conundrum of oppressed groups that fail to recognise their political agency, or are stymied in doing so. Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon and Enrique Dussel each conduct theoretical analyses and fashion concepts that enable these groups better to recognise themselves and their situations and so constitute themselves as radically oppositional political forces. Ciccariello-Maher begins with Sorel. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sorel contended that the European working class could not wait for objective conditions to "ripen" to the point at which their deepening immiseration would inevitably lead them to act. Their identity as a class "for itself," he argues, needs to be consciously instantiated through acts of mythologizing violence against their oppressors. For Fanon, similarly, racialised colonial subjects are not in a position to sign up to a vision of political struggle as a reciprocal structure of recognition and interdependency when colonisation had denied their humanity. They first need to overcome this ontological denial and, in so doing, forge the basis for a positive political grouping. Again, this requires constituting acts of violence. Turning to Dussel, Ciccariello-Maher argues that the former's reading of Levinas on alterity gives him the basis for a politics that is oriented to that which was historically external to the coloniser's ontological and epistemological regimes. Rather than conduct politics on the basis of a one-dimensionally conceived "historical subject" (129), whether that be a subject determined by race, gender, class, Dussel conceptualises the "pueblo" as a group fused by their various exclusions. The "pueblo" is, thus, an "identity of identities" (147). Ciccariello-Maher finishes his study by discussing Chavismo in Venezuela as an example of a "Pueblo" constituting itself and successfully capturing state power. This is a study for our times, attempting in political theory what intersectional activists have been doing in practice: grafting the identity politics of the 1980s and 90s with the re-emergence of first-world socialist politics in the wake of the global financial crisis. The challenge for Ciccariello-Maher, and others who share his aspirations, is to conceptualise an "identity of identities" that is sufficiently concrete for those who act on its behalf. Are these simply rainbow coalitions that form in response to particular issues only to dissolve, or can these alliances be turned into formal groupings that pursue lasting programs? As an argument against a certain kind of stodgy dialectical materialism, Ciccariello-Maher's thesis rests on two connected claims: i) that any dialectical political theory premised on mutual recognition and dependence between classes will be ineffective where one party is treated as "sub-ontological"; ii) that such relations of non-reciprocity are endemic to the colonial situation and its aftermath. This explains the title, which promises to "decolonize" the Hegelian-Marxian tradition by critiquing the assumption that all politics is one or another manifestation of the dialectic of capital and labour. Key for Ciccariello-Maher is the notion that the dialectic of oppressor and oppressed frequently needs to be "jumpstarted" by identity-based political acts. Once jumpstarted, though, the dialectical motion seems to behave in the same manner as that dynamic negation of antitheses given an ideal account by Hegel. The philosophical presuppositions of dialectics are not really interrogated by Ciccariello-Maher, let alone "decolonized." Ciccariello-Maher takes from Fanon in particular the notion that decolonial politics continually confronts the problem of ontological denial. Is this a pattern that extends beyond the thinkers that this study considers? For instance, do the ideas of the dependency school of economic theory, which saw itself as opposing neo-colonialism, in some way respond to the problem of ontological denial? Or does non-reciprocity in meta-geopolitical relations obey a different logic? In the South Asian context, does Gandhi's program of satyagraha, built as it was on the strong assertion of precolonial Indian identity, obey a decolonised dialectic more so than that of a rationalist communist like M.N...

Unreadable Pleasures

Unreadable Pleasures Jan Mieszkowski (bio) Graecum est, non legitur. This past spring, I asked the students in my comp lit seminar to take a stab at translating Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” into another language. While most of them fashioned Spanish, French, or German versions of the iconic line, one tried to write it in her native Mandarin. The results impressed the only other native Chinese speaker in the class, but the rest of us were not able to appreciate the achievement: 玫瑰有三種存在形式﹕作為一朵玫瑰，作為一朵玫瑰的存在，作為一種存在的玫瑰存在。 Eager to get a sense of what she had done, we asked my student to translate her work back into English, as if we were playing a human version of the game whereby one uses Google Translate to toggle between two languages. Resisting the temptation to tell us that in English her text reads “Rose is a rose is . . .”, she gamely offered, “Rose can exist in three kinds of forms: as being a rose, as being an existence of rose, as being an existence of being a rose.”1 Even if one knows no Chinese whatsoever, there is much to work with in this translation of a translation, starting with what it reveals about the iterations of the word “is” in Stein’s original. In class, we reflected on the significance of grammar for assertions of logical identity, but the question soon “a-rose” as to precisely what we were talking about. Were we discussing Stein? My student’s translation of Stein? Her translation of her translation of Stein? Given that this was a comp [End Page 7] lit seminar, we wanted to say that we were “doing” comparative literature, but there was also some concern that we were operating on rather shaky ground insofar as one of our key reference points was a sentence that virtually none of us could so much as begin to read. Confronted with a sample of a language we did not know whose characters were completely unfamiliar, our sense of discomfort was complemented by admiration for the complexity and diversity of human languages, combined with some respect for, or envy of, the two members of our seminar who possessed a linguistic competency the rest of us would very much like to have. There was also an underlying sense of relief in encountering a string of signs on which we could not reasonably be expected to expend an ounce of hermeneutic energy. Language had not gone on holiday, but in our capacity as exegetes we had been temporarily furloughed. There was no need to debate the virtues of active versus passive or close versus distant reading—with my student’s sentence, reading of any sort was not an option for the vast majority of us. While in most circumstances, we reflexively try to assess, decode, and understand, we were distinctly pleased about being momentarily off the hook when faced with a verbal formation to or for which we had no responsibilities. Stein is notorious for unsettling our relationship with our own language in ways that make us uncomfortable, if not angry. The longer we read her “Rose is a rose” line, the less sure we are about what “rose” means, what “is” means, and what “a” means, much less what repetition, assuming that’s what this is, means. At the same time, Stein routinely suggests that her efforts to expose the volatility or outright instability of the linguistic realm are an attempt to remind us that, absent precarity and uncertainty, words are boring. Her oeuvre is a veritable hymn to the pleasure inherent in the realization that even in our native tongue, we are at best just barely keeping our heads above water and maintaining the fiction that as creatures of the logos our experiences are rational and coherent. If many passages in Stein’s texts can appear to be no less inscrutable than a string of unfamiliar logograms, she is steadfastly optimistic that there is something to be enjoyed in such brushes with the indecipherable. On this basis, Stein’s kinship with Edgar Allan Poe goes well beyond the curious fact that upon her death, Poe’s great-nephew, also named Edgar Allan Poe...

Nation-Making at the Border: Zambian Diplomacy in the Democratic Republic of Congo

AbstractHow and where were new African nations made at the moment of decolonization? Focusing on the periphery rather than the center provides an insightful answer to this question: imposing national identity in border regions with mixed and mobile populations, dynamic migrant flows, and cross-border linkages was a task fraught with contradiction. This article explores the establishment of Zambian political and diplomatic space in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the activities of Zambian political and diplomatic representatives in the southern Congolese city of Elisabethville in the early-to-mid 1960s. It does not assess how effective these officials were in imposing a sense of Zambian national identity, but rather what their efforts reveal about the ideas and values that informed state elites’ assertions of national identity and their relationship to history, local identities, and moral codes regarding, among other things, customary authority and gendered behavior. The article argues that nation-making in newly independent states involved the assertion of not only state sovereignty over territorial space but also symbolic power, the right to classify, and the moral and political notions that underlay ostensibly bureaucratic, disinterested state structures. Analysis of the attempts of Zambia's first diplomatic representatives to establish and assert their notion of Zambian-ness reveals the fragility of new national identities and the extent to which elites sought to underpin these identities by the assertion of moral certainties.

Re-claiming one’s ‘culture': how middle-class capital and participation in higher education can promote the assertion of ethnic identities

ABSTRACT This paper explores the narratives of British-born young women of Bangladeshi heritage to examine the influence of social class and university participation on ethnic identification. As UK-born young people of minority ethnic origins access higher education in growing numbers, questions about their socio-cultural incorporation are increasingly salient. This article draws on interviews with 21 female undergraduates of Bangladeshi background. It investigates their understandings and constructions of their ethnic identities and underlying processes related to class location and trajectory. This is conceptualised following Bourdieu as an amalgam of economic, cultural and social capital. Findings highlight: how middle-class capital can be drawn on in the construction of a ‘positive' ethnic identity; how intersecting ethnicised and classed hierarchies of value can hamper the development of a positive conception of one’s ethnicity and lead to ‘self-distancing’; and how participation in higher education can favour the re-evaluation and ‘re-claiming' of ethnic identities by promoting exposure to new and valued interpretive repertoires of what it means to be Bangladeshi. They reveal the fluid, relational character of the meanings and value attached to ethnic categories by young people of minority ethnic background, and the significance of economic, social and cultural capital in informing these meanings.

Intersectional dress

The study of dress and adornment practices is perforce the study of the materialisation of intersecting identities. Class, gender, sexuality, age, race, dis/ability and other identity markers are all writ large on an individual’s clothed body and Crenshaw’s (1991: 1296) suggestion in her influential Stanford Law Review article, ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, ‘that intersectionality might be […] broadly useful as a way of mediating the tension between assertions of multiple identity and the ongoing necessity of group politics’ sits at the heart of this issue of Clothing Cultures. Both explicitly and implicitly, the papers herein respond to Crenshaw’s behest that intersectionality ‘be expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color’ (1991: 1245). They reveal and explore the power of such socially constructed identity categories and in doing so corroborate her belief that categories do indeed ‘have meaning and consequences’ but that the ‘most pressing problem, in many if not most cases, is not the existence of the categories, but rather the particular values attached to them, and the way those values foster and create social hierarchies’ (1991: 1297).

English

This paper deals with caste system and its implication in contemporary India. It begins with the origin of caste, religious sanction and justification made by ancient Hindu scriptures. How the role of caste which was originally followed on the basis of function among people turned out to be a discriminating element of ‘Untouchability”. It highlights various factors influencing the stabilization and destabilization of caste in the lives of people. Finally, it takes us to understand the process of Dalitization in India which gives future orientation to Dalit struggles. Certainly, their victory is found on the battle ground than visualizing it in the future. In this process at this juncture the political democracy of India is really at stake. Key words: Dalit, untouchability, identity assertion, discrimination, Dalitization, dignity of labour, transformation.

Song sung true: performing the nation

ABSTRACTThis article examines the public life of Indian classical music before and after independence. It grounds the articulation of a classical music tradition – style and repertoire – within the nationalist cultural project and identifies important changes in the project after independence. These changes were largely tied to the assertion of regional identities and aspirations that occasionally disrupted the dominant nationalist imagination but by and large conformed to the same. This article tracks the formation of the nationalist cultural project spearheaded by new elites in colonial cities for whom the preservation and redefinition of the classical arts became a matter of serious investment. Music and performance formed an integral element in this as a result of which music appreciation societies came into being and grappled with the challenges of relocating traditional music practices associated with courts and salons in a new public setting. The process of relocation was tied up with the assemblage of new icons intended for performing the nation, a task that the independent Indian state continued with through its new mediums of information and communication.

Sobre a pressuposição das clivadas

O presente artigo apresenta um paradoxo relativo às propriedades pressuposicionais das clivadas e propõe uma solução para ele. De um lado, Figueiredo Silva & Menuzzi (2014, 2015a,b) demonstram que clivadas são favorecidas por uma pressuposição de unicidade quando utilizadas como respostas a perguntas WH, o que sugere que são caracterizadas por tal pressuposição (cf. WEDGWOOD 2005, WEDGWOOD et al. 2006, MENUZZI 2012, BURING e KRIZ 2013). De outro lado, Moretto (2016) e Moretto & Menuzzi (a aparecer) demonstram que certas clivadas são compatíveis com somente e, portanto, com a asserção de exaustividade; nesse caso, são compatíveis apenas como uma pressuposição mais fraca, de existência (cf. HORN 1981, 1996). A explicação que proponho para esse paradoxo é a seguinte: uma asserção de identidade fornece uma resposta completa apenas quando há uma pressuposição contextual de unicidade – que não é propriedade inerente das perguntas WH (contra POLLARD & YASAVUL, a aparecer).

NURTURING ABSTRACTIONS OF THE NATION IN RELIGIO-CULTURAL IDENTITY ASSERTIONS AND SPACES OF GENEROSITY IN SUFI DARGHAS OF KARNATAKA

Socio-political reality is often brought into being through performative acts. To say that religio-cultural identity stakes its claim on the socio-political through performative utterances is to also state that socio-political realities appear as effects of articulated ideology. It has been well acknowledged that socio-political ideology presents itself as if it were offering some ‘deeper, extra political truths’ of being and becoming that are constant. This brings forth a believing community, which functions as a stabilizing occurrence for these ‘deeper, extra political truths’ of being and becoming. Assertions of essential religio-cultural identity constitute one such discursive practice that brings into effect communities that nurture binarizing abstractions such as what it is to be ‘Indian’, the idea of who is a ‘Hindu’ and the notion of nationalism that elects an umbilical connect to the Hindu Vedic lineage. It is to understand the processes that are involved in the crafting of these extra political truths of being and becoming, to examine whether these truths are in fact extra political, and to come to an understanding of how the believing communities which are effected preserve an abstraction of pure national identity that this study engages shared sacred spaces that have been claimed by Hindu right-wing assertionists in India. In such an effort, the juxtaposition-ality of these shared sacred spaces of grace that harbor a substratum of generosity and sharing, marks the essentializing procedures of right wingers and their aggressive mining for a pure Indianness. Except that the ground they mine is amorphous.

Introduction: The Political Dynamics and Social Effects of Megaproject Development

This special issue examines the political context and social impacts of plans for two state-sponsored megaprojects in Timor-Leste: the Special Zone of Social Market Economy (ZEESM) in the Oecusse enclave, and the Tasi Mane Project stretching along the south coast. Tracing debates about national development models in Timor-Leste back to the Indonesian occupation and transition period to independence, this Introduction situates these projects within contemporary debates about development. We pay special attention to two key aspects: how megaprojects transform people’s relations with the land, a vital source of livelihoods and cultural meaning; and how different ethnolinguistic groups in Timor-Leste are adapting local practice to accommodate change. We conclude by highlighting how megaprojects reflect and affect aspects of life beyond economic development: governance practice, assertion of sovereignty, sensory losses and identity, ritual adaptations and aspirations for the future.