Contours Of Identity Research Articles

David Schenck and the Contours of Confederate Identity by Rodney Steward (review)

David Schenck and the Contours of Confederate Identity by Rodney Steward (review)

Using Social Network Analysis and Framing to Assess Collective Identity in the Genetic Engineering Resistance Movement of Aotearoa New Zealand

In this study of the genetic engineering resistance movement in New Zealand, I utilize social network analysis and framing analysis to demonstrate how meaning-making occurs among a network of core activists. This theoretical and methodological framework enables us to explore the contours of collective identity within the movement, given in particular the diversity of actor grievances, relationships and strategies. While I argue that there is a shared collective identity in the movement, the primary purpose of this work is to show how this approach can be used empirically to demonstrate the relationship between collective identity and movement diversity.

Cultural Tourism in Transnational Adoption

The discursive practices of adoptive parents in two online transnational adoption forums (2006-2008) and observations of five international adoption workshops suggest that what Heather Jacobson described as culture keeping, the cultural socialization of children that retains a sense of native group identity, is more aptly characterized as cultural tourism, the selective appropriation and consumption of renovated cultural symbols, artifacts, and events that serve as the source of identity construction for adopted children. A feature of consumer capitalism, cultural tourism in transnational adoption helps shape the contours of cultural and racial identity. It also provides a partial understanding of how adopted children often fail to develop hybrid identities and how adult adoptees exist on the margins of two cultures.

Vinicius de Moraes and "P�tria minha": The Politics of Writing in Post-war Brazil

This article analyzes Vinicius de Moraes's "Pátria minha" (1948) within the historical context of his first diplomatic post abroad. "Pátria minha" was written while Moraes was stationed in Los Angeles as a Cônsul de Segunda Classe (Ministério, "Moraes" 385). Moraes's poetic interpretations of Brazil often originated from the standpoint of the relationship between the sexes. "Pátria minha" is no exception to this rule, since symbolically gendered relationships play an important role in the poem. Written as an open letter to Brazil of the late 1940s and conceived within the specific politico-cultural context of post-war Latin America, "Pátria minha" traces through intimate imagery the contours of Brazilian identity as it conjures a complex and vulnerable nation. In the poem, the nation is articulated as being in transition and threatening dissolution because of its precarious position between local and global hegemonic discourses, namely the Vargas legacy and US expansionism. This article analyzes some of the analogies between Moraes's diplomatic work and his poetic conception of Brazilian identity during this tense period in national history by utilizing original archival materials, such as personal correspondence and diplomatic documents located in the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa and in the Arquivo Histórico do Itamaraty in Rio de Janeiro.

Urban Revolt, Nationalist Revolutions: Puebla and Valencia, 1808-1814

Between 1808 and 1814, the cities of Puebla and Valencia resisted invasion, established and participated in constitutional government and negotiated new forms of local and national identity forged during the wars. Clerics played central roles in both the warfare and political revolutions of the epoch, as priests spearheaded armed resistance and participated in the formation of new governments. Across the Spanish Monarchy, patriotic rhetoric and liberal notions of the sovereignty of the people spread from Enlightenment-era salons to political debates and to the pulpits of the Catholic church. Urban residents navigated and reinterpreted liberal ideals in a burgeoning public sphere. The combined efforts of local actors and municipal bodies established a revolutionary template upon which, by 1812, the Cortes of Cádiz had consolidated a new liberal regime. In sum, urban revolts in both hemispheres transformed the contours of government and national identity within a crucible of conflict.

The Contours of Identity: Relational Dynamics in the Psychotherapy of Long-Term Mental Illness

After the waves of change resulting from the biological revolution in psychiatry gradually receded, interpersonal approaches to the study of serious mental illness, long in decline, once again regained currency. The renewed emphasis on subjectivity, spurred in large measure by the burgeoning recovery movement, brought the lived experience of illness to the forefront of research. However, inquiries into psychotherapy paid little heed to the interior world of therapists immersed in the longterm treatment of severe mental illness. Their experiences failed to garner much attention despite the adoption of intersubjective perspectives in broader interpretations of psychotherapy. The purpose of this essay is to look anew at the dynamics that arise in the psychotherapy of major mental illness and recast light on the struggles of both clients and clinicians through an intensive case presentation exploring the contours of identity.

Reading the plains and the lake: Landscape in Hungarian travel literature

Travel writing has enjoyed continuous success since the Renaissance, and has been an important factor in shaping perceptions of individual and group identities. Especially during the second half of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century travelogues constituted an influential part of the discourse on culture, and helped, through their descriptions of the foreign and a reaffirmation of what is “us”, establish the ideology of nationalism. Works by British authors such as William Wordsworth and the travel writings of Hungarian poet Sandor Petőfi and politician, essayist, and novelist Jozsef Eotvos offer examples of different strategies of using landscape as means of affirming contours of national identity.

Words Upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (review)

Reviewed by: Words Upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study Omri Elisha James Bielo. Words Upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009. 208 pp. The rise in interest in American evangelicalism on the part of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals in recent years has been staggering. Although much new light has been shed on this vibrant religious subculture as a result, all too often the attention remains focused on its most public characteristics, including the political affinities and aspirations of evangelical elites, evangelical media production and consumption, and spectacles of corporate worship. The striking irony in all this is that the sites of social intimacy, where evangelical rituals of socialization and indoctrination are most potent, remain hidden from critical inquiry. James Bielo’s Words Upon the Word, a richly detailed comparative ethnography of group Bible study, offers a welcome corrective to this surprising gap in the burgeoning literature on evangelicalism. Having observed an impressive total of 324 Bible study meetings in six demographically varied but predominantly evangelical congregations in Lansing, Michigan, Bielo uses a smaller sample to support his analysis [End Page 1077] while still being able to posit broad conclusions about these weekly gatherings attended by some 30 million Protestants nationwide. Words Upon the Word is an “ethnography of reading” that highlights the social dynamics and hermeneutic possibilities that emerge when like-minded people come together to engage with sacred texts (i.e., the Bible) and other devotional, historical, and instructional writings that are seen as conducive to one’s spiritual edification. Drawing data and theory together in a fluid and persuasive manner, Bielo describes the interactive frames, interpretive dilemmas, textual ideologies and practices, and discursive subtexts that make possible “processes of collective reading and intersubjective dialogue” (10) in religious settings where seemingly contradictory values of scriptural absolutism and reflexive, lay-driven intellectualism are enacted and negotiated. Among the noteworthy contributions of Bielo’s ethnography is his prominent emphasis on group Bible study as a social institution in its own right. Rather than treat group Bible study as merely a corollary feature of congregational life, or confine it to a mixed bag of pop-culture trends such as book clubs and internet chat rooms (the relevance of which does not go unrecognized), Bielo stresses the uniqueness and deep historical roots of group Bible study among churchgoing evangelicals. His ethnography portrays Bible study as a form of ritual practice but also, and more significantly, as a site of knowledge production where the ideological and epistemological priorities of theologically conservative “Bible-believing” Protestants are continually encountered in contexts of carefully moderated face-to-face deliberation. For cynical non-evangelical readers inclined to dismiss Bible study as little more than the reification of blind faith, Bielo’s account—including lengthy transcripts of group discussions— reveals that the work of consensus-building, even among staunch biblical literalists, requires no small degree of intellectual effort, self-consciousness, and social diplomacy. At the same time it is equally apparent from his descriptions that consensus rather than dissonance is the desired outcome of evangelical Bible study, and that the ideal consensus is one that is neatly aligned with the authoritative fundamentalist doctrines of conservative Protestantism. The heuristic tools of symbolic interactionism and discourse analysis provide much of the theoretical framework for this ethnography, helping to underscore the essentially interactive (or, as believers say, “relational”) aspects of evangelical Bible study. Notwithstanding the individualistic [End Page 1078] overtones of conservative Protestant soteriology and core tenets such as “the priesthood of the believer,” the cultivation of religious subjectivity among American evangelicals is pursued through the medium of social relationships. While this includes relationships with non-believers as well as believers, the context of group Bible study provides the ideal setting for “intimate relational spirituality” (92), a key paradigm from which prevalent symbolic and linguistic cues are derived. In the process, the contours of evangelical identity take shape through performances of relational piety and the mobilization of gradated distinctions between self and other(s). This has clear implications for how participants carry themselves as actors in the world, influencing their methods of “witnessing” on behalf of...

Reflections on Being/Performing Latino Identity in the Academy

This essay explores the issue of Latino performance and performativity in a personal and self-referential analysis. By locating Latino performance in the academy, the author explores the contours of identity and image in an environment that often marginalizes Latinas/os. The auto-ethnographic voice employed affords the opportunity to engage how certain tactics and strategies of standing out and fitting in occur in the academy and how some responses to the academy may be complicit in the continuity of expectations. The author makes no claims to generalizability but does invite the reader to dialogue with the issues of marginalization, contingent identity, the performance of a racialized self.

Dispersionism, Pluralism, and the Nebulous Contours of Post-Jewish Identity

Dispersionism, Pluralism, and the Nebulous Contours of Post-Jewish Identity

When East Meets East: Framing the Sino-South Asian Diaspora

This essay examines the contours of Chinese identity in the Indian subcontinent through three Sino-South Asian texts: “Travels Afar” (2001) by Chinese-Pakistani writer Maria Tham, “In Search of Lin Jia Zhuang” (2001) by Chinese-Sri Lankan writer Milan L. Lin-Rodrigo and The Palm Leaf Fan and Other Stories (2006) by Chinese-Indian writer Kwai-Yun Li. The shared configurations of the two autobiographical essays and the short story collection — all three are triangulated narratives involving ancestral origin in China, birth and adolescence in South Asia and eventual migration to North America — highlight a forgotten circuit of diasporic movement: one that does not simply follow an East-West pattern of migration, but also inhabits a middle place in the Indian subcontinent. In placing these three works next to each other, I sketch the thematic preoccupations of the twice-migrant Sino-South Asian diaspora, particularly focusing on where we can situate writing and writers that are Chinese in ethnicity, South Asian in upbringing and North American in location.

Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age

Black gospel music grew from obscure nineteenth-century beginnings to become the leading style of sacred music in black American communities after World War II. Jerma A. Jackson traces the music's unique history, profiling the careers of several singers - particularly Sister Rosetta Tharpe - and demonstrating the important role women played in popularizing gospel. Female gospel singers initially developed their musical abilities in churches where gospel prevailed as a mode of worship. Few, however, stayed exclusively in the religious realm. As recordings and sheet music pushed gospel into the commercial arena, gospel began to develop a life beyond the church, spreading first among a broad spectrum of African Americans and then to white middle-class audiences. Retail outlets, recording companies, and booking agencies turned gospel into big business, and local church singers emerged as national and international celebrities. Amid these changes, the music acquired increasing significance as a source of black identity. These successes, however, generated fierce controversy. As gospel gained public visibility and broad commercial appeal, debates broke out over the meaning of the music and its message, raising questions about the virtues of commercialism and material values, the contours of racial identity, and the nature of the sacred. Jackson engages these debates to explore how race, faith, and identity became central questions in twentieth-century African American life.

The Middle Passage: Migration and Displacement of Sri Lankan Tamil Women of the Diaspora

The article attempts to grapple with the different facets of marginalisation produced by a specific type of Diasporic activity - as women, as Sri Lankan Tamils, and as participations that must negotiate a process that is at once transnational and postcolonial. Through the examination of different cultural modes of expression, novels, stories, and pamphlets, it attempts to answer as to how the Sri Lankan Tamil woman, away-from-home, makes sense of her world and how she sees it vis-a-vis her 'homeland.' Though displaccement itself contains the libertatory potential, is this 'truth' of a better world often distorted by the indirect and direct controls imposed by a hegemonic West? Through the metaphor of the woman's body, the author attempts to map the contours of identity=politics that are at aplay on trans-border women. By marking the different phases in the process of Tamil migration, she notes the change that has come about in the constitution of 'nationalist' identities, the role of transnational locations, and in the final phase, the reformulation of identity with changes in class. Of particular interest here is the continuation of the Tamil nation, and the role it plays in the re-production of the marginalisation of women. What way out is there then? For the author, there is a 'middle passage,' one that re-negotiates the contours of her own body, and thus her nation, through her own modes of expression, not radically or transgressively, but less violently.

Homicide and ‘Englishness’: Criminal Justice and National Identity in Victorian England

One venue for the formation of national identity that has received comparatively little attention in recent years, is that of the courtroom. In particular, the treatment of serious crimes in Victorian England involved a good deal of reference to notions of Englishness. In the course of their routine work, Victorian criminal courts promulgated particular and generally coherent views as to how ‘an Englishman’, as opposed to a foreigner, was expected to behave. This article examines how the judicial treatment of three types of nineteenth‐century violence – the duel, knife‐fighting and the killing of an adulterous spouse or his or her lover – contributed to reshaping the contours of male English national identity.

The Rise of a Jazz Art World (review)

Paul Lopes's detailed and lengthy study explores the evolution of ideas about the nature and significance of jazz, both as a music and as a cultural phenomenon, during the entire twentieth century. Lopes, a sociologist, begins by noting that creators and aficionados of many musical styles seek legitimacy and institutionalization within their culture, and that in the United States the legitimacy that is sought is usually modeled on that afforded European art music. For jazz musicians, critics, and listeners, the "quest for legitimacy" meant negotiating a modern mass culture which alternately used, abused, and ignored jazz for diverse reasons and purposes. "The key question," Lopes writes, "is how jazz came to signify various contours of status, distinction and identity in American music confronted by professional musicians and others" (p. 8). Influenced primarily by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who writes about social "fields of force" that [End Page 890] shape the definition and reception of artistic products, Lopes traces discourses on jazz since the 1910s.