Contours Of Identity Research Articles

Crossing Borders, Shifting Identities: The Transnational Journey of Wafa Faith Hallam from Morocco to America

Wafa Faith Hallam's memoir, The Road from Morocco, presents a profound narrative that spans the personal and cultural journeys of two Moroccan women, Wafa and her mother Saadia, against the backdrop of postcolonial shifts and Western influences. Born into a conservative Muslim society and later migrating to America, their stories intricately map the contours of identity, freedom, and resistance within and across the boundaries of tradition and modernity. Wafa's transition from a lifestyle characterized by personal freedom in Morocco to confronting the harsh realities of domestic violence in America, alongside Saadia's quest for autonomy and escape from patriarchal constraints at home, reveals a profound disillusionment. Both women anticipated that America would offer them romance and liberation, only to encounter even more intense patriarchal oppression. The idea conveyed in the narrative is that the West, contrary to its image as a bastion of gender equality and freedom, can exhibit even more severe forms of gender despotism than those found in traditional Oriental societies. The memoir presents a deconstructive counternarrative that critiques both the West and Western feminism. The Road from Morocco is not merely a recounting of personal history but a significant contribution to the discourse on postcolonial identity, gender dynamics, and the immigrant experience, inviting a reevaluation of simplistic paradigms of gender liberation and oppression.

From G.R.I.D. to AIDS &COVID-19 to Long-COVID: Naming and Defining Biological Threats

This article uses the history of the early U.S. case definition of AIDS to question the imperatives in the newly developed Long-COVID (LC) definition. Doing so allows us to think through the role of case definitions in producing meaning in our world and to consider what we can learn about the politics of knowledge creation. By examining the porous boundaries of identity, institutions, and AIDS and placing this history in relation to LC, I argue that the state is doing more than describing and diagnosing these institutional practices, but that hybrid identities are produced by the state through these practices like naming and defining. Comparing these two events in public health reveals the state to be a primary—perhaps the primary—agent in elaborating the contours of identity through disease. I employ an analytic framework based on the institutionalization of "identity stories" established by political scientist Clarissa Rile Hayward to argue that the case definition is a central site where knowledge about disease and identity is built into the structure of political institutions. Identifying how this process happens within institutions provides important political lessons for our current moment and offers opportunities for resistance to health inequities.

Living with the Aadhaar: India’s Changing Contours of Identity and Governance

Living with the <i>Aadhaar</i>: India’s Changing Contours of Identity and Governance

Digital identity in the space of digital culture

The dynamism of the modern epoch in many ways requires the same dynamic definition of its role and signif-icance in this rapidly changing world, and it is also necessary to designate the identification code of this peri-od of history. Obviously, the problem of any historical space, any historical period is the definition of identi-ty. Only when the boundaries and contours of identity are found can a person adequately understand his role and place in the flow of history, in social practice. Modern reality, which is being realized in the context of the intensification of the total digitalization process, requires a search for your identification code. Especially on the scale of an actively becoming digital culture. It was this research perspective that determined the con-tent of this article. The authors, relying on socio-philosophical research techniques, analyzed digital identity within the framework of the phenomenon of digital culture. The authors pay special attention to the risks that such an identity carries; the authors also point out the possibility of dissonance in digital and real identities. The authors' scientific interest is related to the objective difference between real identity and the identity that they present in the digital space. As a rule, these types of reality do not coincide and contradict each other. This state can lead to dissociative personality and a feeling of one’s own uncertainty. And in this sense, the task of society is to create a digital situation in which a person would objectively evaluate himself both in real life and in the field of digital space. The state and society bear a certain responsibility for the possible risks and challenges that the active process of digitalization brings, which does not exclude, of course, the personal responsibility of each participant in digital communication.

The Phenomenon of Creative Heritage in Socio-Humanitarian Discourse

The main idea of the article is to address the phenomenon of creative heritage as an independent basic concept of modern socio-humanitarian research. Having analyzed a certain corpus of works in the field of memorial cultural practices, the authors came to the conclusion that there is no instrumental distinction of the concepts “cultural memory”, “artistic heritage”, “creative heritage” in this discursive field. The novelty of the study lies in analyzing the specificity of the concept “creative heritage”, as well as its role in contemporary socio-humanitarianism in general and art history in particular. Since the field of applied interest of the authors lies in the sphere of a specific art form — dance, practical conclusions are drawn in relation to it. It is emphasized that along with the generally accepted methods of research in a given discursive space — typological, structural, functional, biographical — the method of humanitarian blockchain and the concept of “artistic code of the epoch” proposed earlier by one of the co-authors can be used to study the creative heritage of a person (creative group) in the history of art. Emphasis is placed on the relevance of this research policy in connection with the current geopolitical agenda, the practices of “culture of cancellation” being implemented before our eyes, and, accordingly, the need to develop effective projects in the sphere of state cultural policy, forming the working contours of cultural memory and national identity. The problem of identifying, studying and preserving the creative heritage as part of the cultural heritage acquires special relevance in the realities of the modern historical stage — the “early digital era”, accompanied by the rapid development of digital technologies, including destructive ones such as deepfake. The practical potential of the development of this concept is particularly noted, which allows for the consistent preservation of traditions and innovations in artistic activities, to use both the formed array of cultural heritage of different levels and the potential of creative cultural industries.

The Descendants of Lithuanian Immigrants in Kazakhstan: Contours of Ethnic Identity

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Research on the forced migration of Lithuanians to the east of the former Soviet Union in the 1940s and early 1950s throws up a wide range of issues. Methodologically, most of such studies are similar in terms of the sample chosen, which consists of the former prisoners of gulags and exiles who have returned to Lithuania, but it usually disregards those who stayed. Accordingly, the Lithuanian diasporas that emerged in the east after the forced migration, including in Kazakhstan, have not been studied in detail. In this article, our aim is to answer the questions of how and in what private and public contexts processes of the ethnic identification of the Lithuanian diaspora in Kazakhstan are determined, how ethnic boundaries are drawn, and what cultural and social resources are used for this purpose. As the research revealed, the conceptualisation of ethnicity implied by the Kazakhstan state that has been adopted by our informants eliminates its cultural content, or at most reduces it to forms evident in festive culture, as well as the need and possibilities for its expression. As a result, ethnic identity is constructed on the basis of what is almost the sole criterion: Lithuanian descent in the form of ‘root’ or ‘blood’. For most of our informants, ‘roots’ are just a fact of origin, as shown in the practice of entering Lithuanian ethnicity in personal documents, an officially required practice which does not have and does not presuppose any enactment of ethno-cultural differences. Ethnicity, which is seen as ‘in-rooted’ but also as culture-less and as muted by a doubling of roots among ethnically mixed families of origin, enables a whole spectrum of manipulations of ethnic identity. One such manipulation is attempting to profit from the Lithuanian ethnic identity by turning it into a resource for acquiring benefits. The practice of profiteering from the Lithuanian ethnic identity, and thus its transformation into a resource for gaining benefits in the forms of Lithuanian citizenship and a hope of being repatriated to Lithuania, is probably the most frequent factor in becoming Lithuanian by remembering Lithuanian roots and activating the Lithuanian ethnic identity.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Afrofeminist Microhistories and the Making of Modern Black French Identities

This article explores recent works by French Afrofeminists that interrogate notions of Frenchness and colorblindness through staking claims to Black diasporic identity. Examining Audrey Celestine's Une famille française (Paris, Éditions Textuel, 2018) and Maboula Soumahoro’s Le Triangle et l’Hexagone (Paris, La Découverte, 2020) in relation to notions of intersectionality, diaspora, and the “Third Space,” the article reveals how these writers construe Black identity formation in the context of modern France through collective family memory and through conceptualizing both womanhood and race in the geographic prism of the French empire, past and present. Celestine’s and Soumahoro’s interwoven narrative style permits them tell intimate stories of family and personal identity while exploring broader phenomena of colonialism, empire, and systemic intersectional racial, gender, and religious discrimination. Ultimately, these writers work to draw the contours of modern Black French identity and to assert it as an essential part of French history and society that neither claims to systemic universalism nor colorblind rhetoric officially promulgated by the state can erase.

Law’s Dark Clarity: Hugo and the ‘Misery’ of Legal Categorizations

Abstract Laws punish delinquents after having made them such, and yet this is not inevitable. At work in this phenomenon is a melding of ‘ought’ and ‘is’ in which the law renders criminal behavior perpetually determinative by recognizing only a duty to abide by statutes while simultaneously losing site of the magma of meanings and behaviors that constitute human lives. Using the core of Hugo’s epic Les Misérables as a kind of mirroring illustration, this paper will explore how categorical rigidity and blindness to the changing contours of identity and subjectivity constitute one dark side of the law. Hugo’s work demonstrates the importance of literature as a parallel narrative that can illuminate law’s limitations, specifically, its tendency to conceal through certainty, ignoring the actual possibilities of becoming for the subjects it is charged to rule and protect. I will argue that in Les Misérables we can see an inversion in the order of priority between narrative commitment and social criticism, specifically a meta-legal criticism that has specific insights regarding how law obfuscates the ought/is divide and, in so doing, loses legitimacy and collapses in on itself. Issues of human dignity, social responsibility and the very purpose and legitimacy of law can be constructively addressed through parallel analysis of Hugo’s world of ‘the wretched’ and those the law renders wretched even today.

Socrates and Orunmila in Conversation

The debate on the non-philosophical and non-scientific character of classical African intellectual tradition has spread for so long and become a dominant locus. In the context of the multicultural relations that currently map and shape the contours of human identity, it is now fashionable to appraise cultures and identities not in isolation or with reference to uniqueness but in terms of confluent epistemologies, mutual and inter-related intellectual historical identities. This trend toward networking global intellectual history is laudable, as globality narratives on knowledge production fundamentally entail harmony, shared lifeworld, humanity imaginaries and essences as core moral- epistemological values. Against this background, this article engages in an intercultural analysis of Orunmila in classical Yorùbá-African thought, and Socrates in classical Greek thought, to discover the areas of Afro-European thought confluence in the philosophies of these two historic figures. Consequently, this article uncovers the historical and textual evidence in the oral literature of the Yorùbá that validates the ancient philosophical thoughts of Orunmila as no less sophisticated vis-à-vis that of Socrates in ancient Greek philosophy. This article argues that the classical philosophies of both Socrates and Orunmila are mutually sympathetic with fundamental lessons for developing contemporary intellectual canons of intercultural philosophy.

Contesting Liberal Citizenship

Political and social research on populism has discussed its development in the framework of modern constitutional democracies. Populism thrives as ‘parasitic’ to those democracies by addressing their unfulfilled promises. Citizens’ loss of trust in the system opens the way for varied forms of ‘populist ruptures’, facilitating the construction of the category of ‘the people’, through which leaders and their followings claim to stand for all citizens and embody the common will. This article analyzes how, both discursively and performatively, populism addresses major parameters and antinomies of Liberal democratic citizenship, e.g., by recalibrating representation and mass participation. Analysis indicates that by impacting the contours of collective identity as much as citizen expectations, entitlements and commitments, populism challenges the Liberal conceptions of citizenship that uphold modern constitutional democracies.

The Politics of Difference: Ol-Chiki and Santal Identity in Eastern India

The indigenous people of India have a very contested history of their origin, and hence a blurred identity. The initial contours of tribal identity in India was shaped by the idea that tribals should be assimilated into the dominant Hindu fold or integrated as citizens of a nation state. The dominant communities wanted the tribals even to learn and speak the languages of the dominant groups over their own native languages. On the other hand, the struggles against this discrimination waged by the oppressed and subordinated forlast two centuries or more were seen as struggle for recognition as equals. However, in recent times, as a counter to the threat posed to the tribal ways of living by the dominant groups, articulation of tribal identity has been emerging from within. The new struggle encompassed another completely new and opposite demand – the demand for recognition of difference. Building on Santali script (Ol-Chiki) movement in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha, the paper argues that the struggle for equal rights of citizenship and distribution along with taking pride in their own tribal identity has led to the development of subnationalism among the Santals in Eastern India.

The Elusive Contours of Constitutional Identity: Taricco as a Missed Opportunity

The primacy of EU law continues to be challenged by domestic courts relying on the notion of constitutional identity. These challenges are no longer limited to the Solange case law of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG) and the controlimiti doctrine of the Italian Corte Costituzionale. More recently, the Hungarian Constitutional Court introduced the notion of ‘historical constitutional identity’ – at a time when the rule of law and independence of the judiciary are in retreat in several parts of the EU. Against this backdrop, this article argues that the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) missed a formidable opportunity to clarify the outer limits of constitutional identity under Article 4(2) of the Treaty on European Union in Taricco II. Given prudential considerations as well as parallel legislative developments, it can be explained why the CJEU chose to side-step the issue. However, in the Corte Costituzionale, the CJEU found a cooperative and EU law friendly interlocutor which would have allowed it to clarify these limits on its own terms. The CJEU cannot and should not hide from this issue forever. The next domestic court to raise this issue may be less interested in judicial dialogue and more in undermining the primacy of EU law in ever more extensive ways.

Diaspora and Transnationalism: the Changing Contours of Ethnonational Identity of Indian Diaspora

Abstract Diasporic communities have historically maintained—either actively or passively—their ethnonational identities, be it in the case of classical diasporas such as the Jews or Armenians or the case of more modern diasporas such as the Indians or other South Asians. However, the ethnonational identities of diasporic communities have strengthened significantly in recent times as a result of the global forces such as the Internet that created and recreated the existing and newer ways of transnationalism and ethnonationalism. The study of the Indian diaspora is inherent because of the fact that these global forces have drastically changed the ethnonational identity of Indians in the diaspora. There are a plethora of factors that played an important role in this process of transformation. This article tries to examine two of the most significant factors that strengthened the ethnonational identity, such as the dynamic changes in the Indian government policy towards diaspora and the role of the Internet that facilitates the youth to play a prominent role in this neo-diaspora.

New geographies of commemoration

This article identifies new geographies of commemoration. These draw on non-representational perspectives that foreground the experiential aspects of commemorative sites and events, drawing these together with methodologies alive to the subtle but excessive feelings that arise in such settings. It argues that one aim of commemoration – to reinforce the contours of national identity – is disrupted by a focus on the experiential world because of the unpredictable and excessive nature of sensory and affective feelings. New research in geographies of commemoration also draws together different temporalities, holding the potential to unsettle and complicate national narratives.

‘22 Push-Ups for a Cause’: Depicting the Moral Self via Social Media Campaign #Mission22

In 2016, the online cause #Mission22 went viral on social media. Established to raise awareness about high suicide rates among US military veterans, the campaign involves users posting a video of themselves doing 22 push-ups for 22 days, and on some platforms, to donate and recruit others to do the same. Based on a ‘big data’ analysis of Twitter data (over 225,883 unique tweets) during the height of the campaign, this article uses #Mission22 as a site in which to analyse how people depict, self-represent and self-tell as moral subjects using social media campaigns. In addition to spotlighting how such movements are mobilised to portray moral selves in particular ways, the analysis focuses on how a specific online cause like #Mission22 becomes popularly supported from a plethora of possible causes and how this selection and support is shaped by online networks. We speculate that part of the reason why Mission22 went ‘viral’ in the highly competitive attention economies of social media environments was related to visual depictions of affective bodily, fitness and moral practices.

Mei Mei, A Daughter's Song: Review

The most compelling aspect of Mei Mei: A Daughter’s Song is its enduring power as cultural critique. On the surface, the subject matter is the universal conflict between mother and daughter, but this radio docudrama by Taiwanese-American producer Dmae Roberts is in fact an ambitious exploration of the complex meanings of race, hybridity and cultural ‘mixedness’ that outline the contours of identity in multicultural societies such as the US. As an Asian-American ‘minority’ discourse, this documentary disrupts the dominant ‘white vs other’ understanding of culture by exploring Roberts’ ambivalence about her own biracial identity (her mother is Taiwanese, her father is ‘white’ American). Roberts’ feelings of alienation and frustration growing up American and hiding her Asian-ness underscore the shame she feels about her mother, who in turn is disappointed in her not so dutiful daughter. This tension serves as a metaphor for larger racial and cultural tensions, issues that have even more resonance today than when Mei Mei was first broadcast in 1989. This article examines how Roberts achieves this cultural critique in under 27 minutes by layering first person narrative, dialogue, actuality and dramatic fairy tale elements in Taiwanese, Chinese, and English into a sometimes playful, sometimes haunting soundscape. The fact that the foreign language sonic elements or the mother’s broken English may be incomprehensible is not just about adding texture, but about a rich subtext that invites the listener to experience this docudrama as a form of intercultural theatre. Mei Mei is intelligent radio, intensely personal in tone yet conceptually grand in scope. It is the work of a generous producer. DOWNLOAD FULL REVIEW WITH AUDIO LINKS AS PDF

The First Acadian Film: Visibility, Modernity, and Landscape in Les aboiteaux

In 1955, on the bicentenary of the Acadian deportation, the National Film Board released Les aboiteaux, the first film with an original Acadian script and one that spoke volumes about the changing contours of Acadian identity in the postwar period. Directed by Léonard Forest, one of the many Acadian artists depicting their society's engagement with modernity, the film challenged the Acadian self-image of constituting a diasporic people. Instead, Les aboiteaux advanced a more territorial view of Acadian identity, grounded in places such as southeastern New Brunswick where the film takes place. Here Acadians were still living on a landscape created by their pre-deportation forebears through the construction of a system of dykes, known as aboiteaux, which drained the marshlands and allowed the people to settle along the rivers that flowed into the Bay of Fundy. By the 1940s, economic circumstances had led to the decay of the aboiteaux, and so Forest's film, using local actors to give it a documentary feel, describes one Acadian community trying to preserve the ancestral landscape. It shows modern techniques, introduced by the federal Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration, which were able to coexist with more traditional ways, suggesting a bright future for Acadians in a territory they could call their own.

Zadie Smith’s NW or the art of line-crossing

The purpose of this paper is to examine NW, Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, through the notion of crossings, which can be viewed as ethical connections between characters but also as geographical journeys across London, movements along the social scale, multicultural encounters, weavings of various literary traditions and lineages, as well as intertwining of high and popular culture. In each of these areas, the question that is raised in relation to Smith’s novel is whether it is possible to step across the lines that strictly divide people, districts, races, social classes and cultural objects into separate categories and come up with an invigorating melange, or if rigid lines of separation still persist. The argument will draw from David Lodge’s metaphor of the crossroads (when he wondered which directions the novelist of the second half of the twentieth century could take), as well as from Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of lines of “segmentarity” and lines of flight, along which individual and collective lives are ordered or fractured. The aim will be to try and delineate the contours of British contemporary society and identity as depicted in NW.

Rural young people in late modernity: Place, globalisation and the spatial contours of identity

This article draws together arguments for an interdisciplinary ‘spatial turn’ within sociology to analyse the subjectivities and biographical imaginings of Australian rural youth. It draws on a theoretical dialogue between theories of social change, and developments in socio-spatial theory in order to analyse the spatial contours of young people’s narratives, making a case for the significance of an ‘extraverted’ and porous sense of place for understanding rural youth identity. After a theoretical argument about the contemporary meaning of place for theories of globalisation and individualisation, the article presents two theoretically driven sets of case studies. The first discusses rural youth whose identities speak to the importance of place and ‘the local’ as resources for identity, while the second describes young people whose identities are ‘stretched’ across multiple spaces and locales. The analysis speaks to the importance of place for understanding the forms of reflexivity that rural youth mobilise in constructing their place in the world, and speaks to new ways in which to re-embed sociological analyses of youth within the spatially complex social landscapes of a globalised world.

La creación de la Semana indianista. Indianidad, Folklore y Nación en Bolivia

During the first half of the twentieth century in Bolivia a redefinition of the contours of national identity occured. Throughout this period, marked by the indigenous rebellion led by Zarate Willka in 1899, the specter of the race war and the Aymara migration to the city of La Paz resulted in the reconfiguration of the notions of Indian and race. This article discusses these changes from a historical perspective through the study of the so-called Indianist Week organized in 1931. It specifically analyzes the influence that the condensation of artistic, intellectual and public rituals, which staged indigenous elements, had in the reconfiguration of the concept of race and its concomitant transformation of the conceptions of Bolivian identity, Indianness and folklore, contributing to the formation of ambivalent representations, typical in the particularities of the Bolivian indigenism from the early twentieth century.