Construction Of Cultural Identity Research Articles

Dunhuang Intangible Arts in the Perspective of Pedagogy and Cultural Studies: Innovative Practices of Intercultural Education and Construction of Cultural Identity

The purpose of this article is to discuss the innovative practice of Dunhuang intangible cultural heritage arts in the field of intercultural education and its role in the construction of cultural identity. Firstly, the article emphasizes the status of Dunhuang intangible cultural heritage art as an important carrier of Chinese traditional culture and a bridge of international cultural exchange, and in the context of globalization, focuses on how Dunhuang intangible cultural heritage art can promote the innovation of the education system and play a key role in global intercultural dialogue; secondly, based on the pedagogical point of view, it elaborates in detail on the way of integrating Dunhuang intangible cultural heritage art into the modern education system as well as the specific application and transformation in order to Then, from the perspective of cultural studies, it explores the role of Dunhuang NFA in the process of globalisation and its impact on individual and collective cultural identities, and reveals its contribution to the maintenance of cultural diversity, the promotion of cross-cultural exchanges and understanding, the strengthening of the local cultural identity, and the shaping of China's global cultural image; lastly, it extracts the practical experience and successful elements of cross-cultural education of Dunhuang NFA through the empirical analysis of the successful cases. Finally, through empirical analyses of successful cases, the practical experience and successful elements of intercultural education of Dunhuang non-heritage art are extracted, and it is concluded that combining Dunhuang non-heritage art with pedagogy and cultural research is of great significance in enriching the connotation of modern education, promoting the construction of cultural identity, and fostering the prosperity and development of global cultural diversity.

Impact of Migration on Identity Formation: A Study of Second-Generation Immigrants

Purpose: This study sought to explore the impact of migration on identity formation looking at the second generation immigrants. Methodology: The study adopted a desktop research methodology. Desk research refers to secondary data or that which can be collected without fieldwork. Desk research is basically involved in collecting data from existing resources hence it is often considered a low cost technique as compared to field research, as the main cost is involved in executive’s time, telephone charges and directories. Thus, the study relied on already published studies, reports and statistics. This secondary data was easily accessed through the online journals and library. Findings: The findings reveal that there exists a contextual and methodological gap relating to the impact of migration on identity formation. Preliminary empirical review revealed that migration experiences profoundly influenced the construction of cultural identities. Through an analysis of diverse experiences, the study revealed the heterogeneous nature of identity trajectories among second-generation immigrants, ranging from strong attachment to ethnic heritage to fluid, hybrid identities. Socio-cultural factors such as family dynamics, socio-economic status, and institutional support played significant roles in shaping individuals' identity formation processes. The findings emphasized the importance of inclusive policies and supportive networks in facilitating positive identity development among second-generation immigrants, contributing to a deeper understanding of identity construction in multicultural societies. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The Social Identity theory, Intersectionality theory and Acculturation theory may be used to anchor future studies on the impact of migration on identity formation. The study made significant contributions to theory, practice, and policy by elucidating the complex interplay between migration experiences and identity formation among second-generation immigrants. Drawing upon established theories such as Social Identity Theory, Intersectionality Theory, and Acculturation Theory, the study provided a nuanced understanding of the factors shaping identity trajectories. Recommendations included implementing culturally responsive teaching practices, developing interventions to support psychosocial well-being, and adopting inclusive integration policies. These insights empowered educators, mental health professionals, community organizations, and policymakers to create more inclusive and supportive environments for second-generation immigrants navigating their identities within the context of migration.

The British (and International?) Music Society: Australian Identity and Musical Internationalism in Interwar Sydney

Abstract In the aftermath of the First World War, Henri Verbrugghen founded the first Australian branch of the British Music Society. The BMS – a product of post-First World War cultural renewal – was established in London to ‘champion the cause of British composers at home and abroad’. In Sydney, these aspirations extended to promoting music from Australia, and through affiliation with the International Society for Contemporary Music, music of the rest of the world. This article explores the activities of the Sydney BMS, situating these within contemporary discourses of nationalism and internationalism in the construction of interwar Australian cultural identity. It argues that the sometimes conflicting aims of the society reflect a wider political and social ambivalence about Australia's place in the international landscape. While its primary goal was to champion local composers, this was held in uneasy balance with a desire to promote British music ‘proper’.

Vive la république européenne? Reading The European Balcony Project as artistic counter-public

ABSTRACT The article first contextualizes the European Balcony Project (EBP), a manifesto written by authors Ulrike Guérot, Robert Menasse, and theatre director Milo Rau who subsequently put it up for discussion in various public fora. On 10 November 2018, artists and citizens performed the manifesto and proclaimed the European Republic from (theatre) balconies and public places in 25 European countries. They encouraged a dialogue that sought to promote a more diverse public sphere. In my reading, the EBP emerges as a contemporary version of Oskar Negt’s and Alexander Kluge’s public counter sphere, as a real and imaginary community in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk in an arena of discursive interaction and democratic practice. By reading the texts in the context of a political avantgarde project, I show how the interventions aim to set a counterpoint to the resurgence of nationalism and promote a vision of a democratic continent based in shared values. My article thus illustrates how public art performances such as the EBP contribute to the thickening of imaginative relations throughout Europe and might aid in the construction of a larger European cultural identity.

Cinema Co-production, Film Distribution in Multiple Languages and Inequality in the Global Language System: A Call for Robust Public Data

Language has proven to be an important factor in film performance models, film finance considerations, and festival program selections. This essay uses multi-year global data sets (UN and supplementary databases) to analyse the relationship between the languages in which a film is produced and offered to cinemagoers on the one hand, and the co-production activities and dynamics which engender these patterns on the other hand. While European Commission policies, underlining the peculiar “linguistic polity”of the European Union, have been influential in the making of multilingual cinema productions motivated by subsidy rules, taxation and grant schemes, the pattern is rather global, reflecting uptake of cinematic product in many “territories” and the mobilization of film across national and regional language divides. The analysis shows that Europeanization has much wider implications beyond Europeans’ cultural consumption and identity construction, with Europe’s co-production policies casting a wider net of cultural resistance to Global Hollywood and its majority of English-language blockbusters as well as attending to language preservation in the European neighborhood in addition to Europe, where local and regional heritage policies are well instituted. The study examines the results against Abram de Swaan’s theory of the Global Language System, examining the Q-value theory to the language patterns emerging from film productions with multiple languages, which must be assessed in its relation to cultural consumption that may not follow from formal schooling and habitus formation.

Choice of language in the construction of cultural identity by Tamil speakers in India

Abstract Individuals in multilingual societies are associated with several culturally diverse groups, and so their cultural identity is multifarious and subject to constant change across time and space as a result of increasing intercultural engagements. While cultural norms are essentially embedded in one’s language, the choice of language is understood as a significant tool in projecting the cultural identity of a linguistic community. This paper examines how language choice becomes an agency for Tamil speakers in India to construct their cultural identity. Contextualized among native Tamil speakers in Chennai, the capital city of the southernmost Indian state of Tamil Nadu, this study unravels the narratives by which the speakers’ specific language preference in family, friendship, and institutional domains is used to perform identities and maintain a community consciousness. It also examines the role of language ideologies in contributing to their choices. The study finds that despite the penetration of English into all three domains in varying degrees, Tamil remains the ‘pride’ and the preferred language for all. This affinity is driven by ideological discourses surrounding the cultural history of Tamizhakam, from which arise the need to form a distinct Tamil identity.

Horror and the Cube Films: An unlikely medium for the negotiation of Nationalist-Cultural ideologies

Over the past several decades, scholarship has come to recognise the unexpected significance of horror cinema ventures as both culturally and politically relevant. One of Canada’s greatest horror film successes was Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 psychological thriller Cube that metaphorically explores the suffocating nature of vocational social relations under the conditions of a patriarchal military-industrial capitalism. So innovative was its premise that US interests quickly acquired the rights to produce and distribute Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) and Cube Zero (2004), but they were just as quick to reformulate the most subversive critique of the original film. Two decades later, in 2021, Japanese producers released a remake of the original film (which was so popular there), although it also re-coded the thematic critique, just as the American sequels had done. With this group of films across three national production traditions arises an opportunity to “detect shifts in the ideological constellation”, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, by “compar[ing] consecutive remakes of the same story” (2011, p. 61). Following primarily Herbert Marcuse’s understanding of political repressive tolerance, this article demonstrates the way in which constructions of cultural identity are negotiated across national traditions in the age of globalisation. Cube and its follow-ups demonstrate the nationalist-inflected limits of critical expression in the way that each subsequent film attempts to re-focus and re-code the horrors of the narrative machine in order to assert their own nationalist sensibilities threatened by the cultural levelling effect of globalisation in an age of transnational cinema distribution.

From Third Space to Transnational: A Study of Alter Identities in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine

The burgeoning presence of the Indian Diaspora across the world has triggered a new consideration of the cultural theories of nation, identity and international affairs. Depicting the process of negotiating the borders, both physical borders of states and countries and the metaphorical borders, between genders generations and cultures, Bharati Mukherjee, an American writer of Indian origin, raises the question of space and identity of the Indian immigrants in the US. An attempt is made to map the journey of the Indian Diaspora from the status of the immigrants to that of the transnational citizens of the world. The scope of this study lies in its treatment of transnational space which is going to redefine the idea of Diaspora as a process of gain, contrary to conventional perspectives that construe immigration and displacement as a condition of terminal loss and dispossession, involving the erasure of history and the dissolution of an “original” culture. Rejecting the binaries of the Western Centre and the Eastern Periphery, the paper invites a post-structural approach to the cultural identity construction of the Indian Diaspora.

The Construction of Cultural Identity of the Minority : The Domestication and the Foreignization of Chinese Image in The Woman Warrior

Chinese Americans are a group which shows the feature of cultural hybridity, and The Woman Warrior describes the life experience of a Chinese girl in a foreign land and her imagination of her distant homeland. From the perspective of post-colonialism, cultural identity is gradually constructed and changed. The Woman Warrior translates some Chinese images into English shows the construction of cultural identity which is different from the mainstream culture. The translation strategies adopted by the novel can be divided into domesticating translation and foreignizing translation. The two translation methods have different characteristics and play different roles in the construction of cultural identity. This article adopts post-colonial theory, cultural identity theory and translation strategy theory to analyze the characteristics of domesticating translation and foreignizing translation in The Woman Warrior, and explores translation strategies that are more conducive to the construction of cultural identity through comparison. Finally, it is concluded that foreignizing translation is a more effective translation strategy under the premise of constructing cultural identity.

Becoming a Xia: Constructing Cultural Identity in the History of Wuxia Games in China

This study examines Chinese Wuxia games (martial arts) as cultural artifacts, utilizing a cultural historical approach to analyze their textual content and gameplay in order to explore the construction of cultural identity. I investigate the localization of early games and identify the cultural consciousness of early producers between 1990 and 1995. Through decoding cultural symbols, this research reveals the fixed cultural sources and components of cultural identity from 1995 to 2003. From 2004 to 2009, I examine how the industry's overall decline resulted in fatalism being projected onto the game design, leading to the integration of Wuxia games with contemporary culture and historical characteristics. Between 2010 and 2021, with the growth of player subjectivities, the construction of player identity reveals the fluid nature of cultural identity. This study also identifies three layers of Xia (martial arts hero) identity, including group affiliation, judgment, and creed.

Historical Lessons of the EU Strengthening the Sense of Community and the Enlightenment to China—based on the Perspective of Cultural Edentity Theory1

From the perspective of cultural identity theory, this paper discusses the historical lessons encountered by the European Union in the process of strengthening the Sense of Community, and analyzes the enlightenment of these lessons to China in promoting the construction of cultural identity and forging the Sense of Community of the Chinese nation. Firstly, this paper reviews the evolution of cultural identity in the process of EU integration, then analyzes the EU in the strengthening of Sense of Community challenges and difficulties, to cast on the Chinese nation sense of community to provide different research perspective, which is beneficial to better solve the practical problems encountered in the new era of national work, better safeguard national unity. Finally, it puts forward the reference significance and main measures for China in forging the Sense of Community of the Chinese nation.

Interaction of Cultural Components in the Musical Art of China in the Context of Globalisation Influences

The purpose of the article is to analyse the interaction of Chinese and global elements in music and to highlight how Chinese actively construct their identity through musical discourse. The research employs methods of literary source analysis, conceptual analysis, and methods of cultural analysis to reveal the role of music in the construction of cultural identity. Special attention is given to the analysis of cultural transformations, dynamics of interaction between Chinese and global cultural elements in the field of musical art. The scientific novelty lies in studying the interaction of different cultural components in the musical context of China in the conditions of globalisation. Conclusions. The research results allow us to define the role of music in the formation and preservation of cultural identity in the conditions of variability and cultural interaction. Understanding the essence of music and studying the achievements of their predecessors, the Chinese community employs historically and culturally rooted ideologies and practices to guide their musical discourse. It is argued that Chinese music can acoustically express their national identity, even if the sounds include elements that have external origins or are associated with other cultures. Music emerges as a platform where different nationalities can effectively communicate both among themselves and with representatives of other cultures, expressing their personal and authentic identity.
 Keywords: Chinese music, cultural identity, globalisation, musical dialogue, cultural components.

The Construction of Cultural Identity in Multimodal Discourse Analysis under the Perspective of Media Convergence

Abstract This paper constructs a model of cultural identity by combining the analysis of multimodal discourse in the media fusion perspective and explores how to better construct cultural identity. Firstly, we construct a multimodal cultural identity model in the media convergence perspective from three modalities: text, image, and video combined with cultural identity, so that we can analyze people’s cultural identity through emotion. Secondly, multimodal cross-sectional comparison experiments and dissimilarity experiments are conducted based on two widely used public datasets in the field, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI. The best experimental results were obtained in the baseline model, where Acc-2 reached 84.8%, F1 value reached 84.5, and MAE of the regression task dropped to 0.548. In the robustness study, when the missing rate reached 44%, Acc-2 was only 65.2%, and the gap between the results and the dichotomous classification accuracy of 76.5% achieved by the model in this paper reached 11.3 percentage points. Finally, through affective analysis, cultural identity is the affirmative embodiment of what is most meaningful to the nation formed by people living together in a national community for a long time, and its core is the identification with the basic values of a nation, which is the spiritual bond that unites this national community.

Plural Identity and Migrant Communities in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018)

This paper explores the complexity of plural identities of the characters living within the sociocultural space of a London community, who define themselves as being from “here” and “elsewhere,” in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018). First-generation and second-generation migrants, originally from Ireland, Pakistan, Ja- maica, as well as other nations referred to in the novel, give life to the community at the Ends, a housing estate in Northwest London. On the one hand, in this suburban space, fury, neglect and powerlessness are deeply felt by the locals. However, the community also becomes the location for the creation of social habits, cultural patterns, forms of ex- pression and group unity through the interaction and shared experiences of the locals. This dichotomy reveals underlying anxieties that raise questions about otherness, marginalisa- tion and belonging, and how these aspects intersect in the construction of cultural identity. As characters struggle for meaning against a “cancel culture,” their individual experiences are what constitutes their plural and fluid identities.

Refiguring Refugee Resistance and Vulnerabilities: Hazara Community Publishing in the Australian Resettlement Context

ABSTRACT This research focuses on intercultural negotiations and constructions of contemporary ethnic and cultural identity in a Western country of resettlement, through collaborative community publishing with Hazara people, a persecuted cultural and linguistic group. As a research team, primarily using interviews, we examined the multicultural children’s bookmaking project and the intercultural negotiations undertaken between 2018 and 2022 which led to the publication of an Afghanistani children’s story in three languages (English, Hazaragi and Dari) with artwork created by children. A crafted research narrative is used to present participants’ voices genuinely and respectfully as they generously engaged with our research process. We build upon Judith Butler’s analytical framework of linguistic vulnerability as the generative foundation of resistance to examine how linguistic precarity for Hazaragi speakers resettling in Australia is experienced. We found that community bookmaking and publishing involved complex processes of translation and transliteration where practical and political problems about cultural and linguistic authority were confronted. Engaging in this process of intercultural negotiation affords new possibilities for the resignification of recognisable and intelligible Hazara identities. We argue that a more liveable life for refugees in linguistically precarious resettlement contexts can be supported through culturally and linguistically responsive infrastructure that is respectful of their meaning making resources.

Investment and the inaudible mother tongue: Carving out a space for Kurdish in the soundscape of an Istanbul kebab restaurant

Abstract Firmly grounded in local sociopolitical constraints, language policies at Istanbul's Kurdish-run eating establishments often place Kurdish employees’ cultural identity construction at odds with their workplaces’ economic viability. In the face of rigid structures that cement the dominance of Turkish, the Kurdish managers highlighted in a previous study exercise limited agency to enact language policies that align with their pro-Kurdish ideologies, rendering Kurdish largely invisible. This article revisits these themes by examining a nearby Kurdish-run restaurant with a language policy that violates this norm. Applying Darvin & Norton's (2015) model of investment, analyses of observations and interviews consider identity, ideology, and economic capital vis-à-vis employees’ perceived valuation of Kurdish as a workplace language. Results suggest that capital ownership emboldens the audible articulation of Kurdish identities, which emerge from pluricentrically oriented ideologies, fostering resistance to local language policy norms. (Investment, language policy, capital, Kurdish, ideology, pluricentricity)

Introduction to the Special Issue: Translation in Political Discourse and Global Narratives

Translation serves as a potent yet often overlooked force in political discourse, shaping global narratives and mediating information across linguistic and cultural boundaries. This introduction explores the transformative potential of translation as a form of activism and identity construction in political discourse, delving into its ability to challenge prevailing narratives, amplify marginalised voices, and foster a more inclusive and empathetic global dialogue. Drawing on the insights of George Orwell and John Searle regarding the potency of language in political manipulation and power dynamics, the study illuminates the transformative role of translation as a catalyst for change and cross-cultural understanding. It underscores the significance of activist translation, particularly within Chinese contexts, an area that remains relatively underexplored in scholarly discourse. Structured into three sections, this introduction initially traces the historical underpinnings of activist translation within political and religious discourse, outlining translation's transformative power. The second section analyses how translation influences cultural transmission and identity construction on a global scale. The third section portrays activist translation as a driver of inclusivity, amplifying marginalised voices, dismantling systemic inequalities, and advocating for equality worldwide. Looking ahead, the conclusion outlines challenges and future directions in political discourse translation, emphasising the necessity of maintaining ethical portrayals of cultural identities and addressing cross-cultural misunderstandings. The introduction concludes with a list of references, offering key perspectives to inspire further research in the realm of political discourse translation.

Constructing Chinese Cultural Identity Internationally in Translated Political Discourse

Political discourse is generally assumed to deal with politics, on issues such as policies, power and ideology; however, it also involves cultural issues, thus playing a role in cultural transmission and cultural identity construction. The international addresses delivered by Chinese President Xi Jinping in and outside China are good examples of political discourse that take culture into account. In President Xi’s international addresses, he quoted extensively from Chinese culture to construct an identity of a peace-loving China that seeks peaceful and harmonious co-existence with other nations. How President Xi constructed Chinese cultural identity as a peace-loving nation is of much research interest. To answer this question, we built a corpus of President Xi’s international addresses, which is composed of 145 texts of English versions delivered between 2013 and 2022 on various occasions. We investigated how Chinese cultural identity is constructed in translated political discourse by means of corpus analysis. By analyzing the high-frequency content words, the first-person plural pronoun “we”, LDA topic modeling, and sentiment, we found that a Chinese cultural identity of a peace-loving nation that seeks harmonious relationships with other countries had been constructed in President Xi’s international addresses. Based on the corpus-driven analysis, it is argued that political discourse can also serve as a good channel to construct cultural identity.

Narrating Cultural Displacement and (Dis)Locating Beur Identity in Fouad Laroui’s De Quel Amour Blessé

Abstract In this article, I analyse the prominent Moroccan-French author, Fouad Laroui’s novella De quel amour blessé (What Wounded Love, 1998) which narrates a story of an intercultural love affair in the diaspora, shaped in-between France and Morocco. This tragicomedy romance story, maps migrants’ cultural displacement and identity (re)construction. I look into how Maghrebian migrants’ French-born youths, known as the Beur generation, plot transcendent cultural and national routes of belonging. Through the protagonist’s case, the son of Moroccan migrants, the novella unfolds how postcolonial Maghrebian migration in France has engendered an intercultural and relational identity that belongs to different cultural subjectivities. It suggests a deconstruction of the idea that migrants’ identity are inextricably linked to a fixed culture, time and place, and instead, stresses identity as a process of becoming. Laroui’s narrative is a productive literary form of self-representation, of contesting homeland roots, (re)deconstructing identity and mapping intercultural attachments of belongings.

De-essentializing ethnic identities through narrating a plural belonging: Aesthetics of postmigration in Zafer Şenocak’s novel Perilous Kinship (1998)

I will relocate Zafer Şenocak’s work within the aesthetics of postmigration. His novel Perilous Kinship (Gefährliche Verwandtschaft 1998) can be regarded as an important attempt to challenge and change the political core narrative of Germany as a homogeneous society during reunification times. By contributing to the political and public discourses of national belonging, integration policies and immigration politics from the late 1990s onward, the novel’s fragmented, open-ended story can be seen as a distinct example for a narrative of postmigratory belonging that goes beyond territorial, ethnically essentialized and otherwise fixated constructions of cultural identities, including postcolonial and hybrid identity constructions. The novel, by style and structure, can be analysed through the lens of a transformative aesthetics that makes the visible invisible (and vice versa), undoes marginalization and in so doing demonstrates the construction of identity and society as plural and performative. It further challenges the perception of Berlin as a site of coherent national history by describing it as ‘The capital of the fragment’ and as ‘a city of immigration par excellence’. My argument is that the protagonist’s multi-layered cultural identity construction as someone, who discovers his Jewish-German-Turkish family connections, draws parallels to the conceptualization of Berlin as a super-diverse metropolitan space.