Creation Of Cultural Identity Research Articles

The Role of Landscape Art in Cultural and National Identity: Chinese and European Comparisons

The depiction of landscape in art has played a major role in the creation of cultural identities in both China and Europe. Landscape depiction has a history of over 1000 years in China, whilst in Europe its evolution has been more recent. Landscape art (shan shui) has remained a constant feature of Chinese culture and has changed little in style and purpose since the Song dynasty. In Europe, landscape depictions have been significant in the modern determination of cultural and national identities and have served to educate consumers about their country. Consideration is given here to Holland, England, Norway, Finland and China, demonstrating how landscape depictions served to support a certain definition of Chinese culture but have played little political role there, whilst in Europe landscape art has been produced in a variety of contexts, including providing support for nationalism and the determination of national identity.

Theorizing Diasporic Queer Digital Homes: Identity, Home and New Media

In this essay, I argue that, for the most part, hybridity is a state of confusion or complication rather than a state of empowerment. Because diasporic individuals experience a constant state of flux, the state of hybridity can be considered a fluid state of being that allows contestation, negotiation, and (re)creation of cultural identities. Consequently, diasporic individuals—particularly queer diasporic people—carve out physical, psychological, or cyber locations (homes) where they exist simultaneously within their host, diasporic, and queer cultures.

"The pleasure of writing is inconceivable": William Hutton (1723-1815) as an Author

William Hutton started life as a child labourer, but rose to become a bookseller, stationer, and wealthy paper merchant. Like many autodidacts, he longed to be an author and published 15 popular books. This article examines Hutton’s remarks on ‘writing’, which reveal his motives, methods, and goals of authorship. It also gauges his impact on the literary marketplace by analysing 65 periodical reviews of his works. Hutton’s books were based on personal experience, and mixed memoir and biography with historical, topographical, and travel writing. They suited the nation’s thirst for entertaining formats and established him as a new kind of writer, who produced lively, unlearned books for a commercial age. Hutton’s breach of polite norms and opinionated style horrified the literary establishment. But they also attracted readers lower down the social scale, who enjoyed irreverent views on political, religious, economic, and social issues. Hutton thus had an impact on two contrasting groups of readers and put Birmingham and northern regions on the national literary map. Together this author and his critics offer a portrait of the evolution of authorship, the spread of knowledge and taste, and the creation of cultural identity in a time of literary change.

Soundtrack of a Nation: Race, Place, and Music in Modern Brazil

Ao longo do século passado, os vínculos entre a música e a raça mostram como o ritmo, a melodia, a harmonia e a dissonância têm sido sempre presente onde brasileiros negociar seus lugares físicos e simbólicos na sociedade. Este artigo concentra-se em apenas dois cruzamentos da raça e a música no Brasil: a transformação do samba de som localizada a música nacional, bem como a criação e sucesso global do samba-reggae. Esta análise deve informar qualquer situação onde a música ou qualquer outra forma social/cultural estão presentes na criação da identidade cultural e, simultaneamente, uma força usada para fins explicitamente político ou econômico.

Politics, pain and pleasure: the art of art-making for 'settled' Aboriginal Australians

Since the emergence of the ‘acrylic art movement’ which came out of Papunya in the Western Desert of Australia in the 1970s, Aboriginal art and cultures have become intertwined in public discourse, through government policy, and in visual art worlds. It is arguably through their artworks that Australian Aboriginal people have become increasingly known both within Australia and overseas (Merlan 2001; cf. Fourmille 1994).i Indeed, in many ways, Aboriginal art has come to represent Aboriginal people and their culture (Myers 2002). But what kind of art is acceptably deemed Aboriginal in mainstream art worlds, by Australian Aboriginal people, and why? What does this mean personally, socially and economically for those Aboriginal artists who are located in the south-eastern parts of Australia which were first colonised? For the most part these people are deemed by the mainstream population to have ‘lost their culture’. More than this, they are spoken of by some other Aboriginal people from the more remote and later colonised parts of the continent in similar terms. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Barkindji people of Wilcannia, a small country town in the south-east of Australia, this paper explores the role of art making and art talk and the ways in which these are implicated in the politics of culture, in cultural subjectivity, and in the consolidation and (re)creation of cultural identity.

Nation building and the politics of Islamic internationalism in Guinea: toward an understanding of Muslims’ experience of globalization in Africa

This article discusses the historical role of Islam in the political evolution of Guinea in the broader context of Muslims’ experience of nation/state building and globalization in Africa. This role is examined on the premise that Islam is one of the major globalizing forces (more in the body of the paper on this idea of Islam as a globalizing force) responsible for the formation of what experts have conceptualized as Africa’s “triple heritage” or the juncture of African traditional values, Islamic influence, and the legacy of Western colonialism. The article examines Islam’s role in the creation of cultural identities, territorial polities, and complex regional and trans-continental networks of trade and scholarship in pre-colonial West Africa; the formation of fronts of resistance to European colonial conquest and occupation; and the mobilization of new nationalist forces which sparked the national liberation struggle of the 1940s and 1950s in the region. The discussion of key concepts such as nationalism, nation/state building, internationalism, and globalization exposes the limited applicability of existing theories to the African experience by highlighting the complexity of post-colonial cultural reconstruction and nation building on the continent. From this perspective, the article focuses upon the political and ideological contradictions having marked the relations of the regime of the Parti Democratique de Guinee (PDG) under President Ahmed Sekou Toure and conservative Guinean Muslim circles in the early years of independence, due in part to Toure’s Marxist and socialist leanings of the time. Also comprehensively discussed is this regime’s subsequent ideological incorporation and diplomatic use of Islam in an effort to curb anti-PDG opposition at home and abroad and to free itself from isolation by the West. Hence, President Toure’s successful policy of “offensive diplomatique” geared primarily toward Arab and Muslim nations and organizations but also, though somewhat indirectly, toward Western powers, serves as an example of the dynamics of Islamic internationalism in Cold War global affairs. Past experiences of party-centered and state-controlled regimentation of religious organizations under Toure’s state-party regime is compared to the current trend of self-decentralization and self-internationalization of Islamic forces in light of the challenges of religious radicalism and post-Cold War politics in Africa.

Writing in Nonstandard English (review)

Reviewed by: Writing in nonstandard English ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers, Päivi Pahta Bernd Kortmann Writing in nonstandard English. Ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers, and Päivi Pahta. (Pragmatics & beyond 67.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. vii, 403. This Finno-Swedish coproduction (18 of 24 contributors, including the editors, are affiliated with a Finnish or Swedish university) consists of 22 mostly descriptive papers on the representation of spoken (nonstandard) varieties of English in writing and its functions in different genres and sociohistorical contexts. Besides literary texts (e.g. contemporary Irish writing, Chandler’s fiction, Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, Dickens’s David Copperfield, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn), the reader finds analyses of nonliterary genres as diverse as legal texts, medical treatises, letters, diaries, travelogues, and oral history transcripts. All periods of English from the fourteenth century (Chaucer, Gower) onwards are represented, with an even distribution of studies on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and studies ranging from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Almost all of the historical studies have been authored by members or close associates of the vigorous Helsinki School of historical socio- and corpus linguistics. This also accounts for the quantitative approach adopted in most of the papers. Apart from the corpus-based studies, the contributions to this volume represent a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches: literary interpretation, historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. Just as varied are the lessons one can learn from the individual contributions. To name just a few: Patricia Poussa convincingly rehabilitates Charles Dickens as a lay sociolinguist, as it were, who in David Copperfield rendered the older dialect of East Anglia in a systematic and faithful way. Other studies show that in many texts in which one might expect a high proportion of nonstandard features, these seem to have been systematically filtered out on all structural levels (cf. the joint paper by Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö, and Kate Moore’s critical report from the fieldwork front on the deplorable practice of what she calls ‘linguistic airbrushing’ in transcripts of oral history interviews). Another angle from which the representation of nonstandard varieties is looked at is the complex of language attitude, language ideology, and creation of cultural identity (cf. the papers by Gerald Porter and Loreto Todd). One problematic aspect of this volume is its rather loose understanding of what constitutes ‘nonstandard’. Uncontroversial are regional varieties such as Irish English; Scots; the dialects of Lancashire, Norfolk, and the Shetlands; Caribbean Creoles, and West African Englishes. Yet some of the authors stretch the concept of nonstandard to such an extent, partly even beyond recognition, that one wonders whether the relevant paper really belongs into this volume. Laura Wright, for example, defines as nonstandard the use of a restricted range of standard variants as opposed to the full range of options the grammar of standard English allows. No less problematic is the interpretation of nonstandard in two other papers. David C. Minugh is simply interested in archaic [End Page 385] forms like thou, thy, thine, or the -eth ending on verbs as used in contemporary newspaper language. At the end of his paper he wonders himself whether these forms should really be considered nonstandard and suggests that a case can also be made for regarding them as part of ‘highly prestigious formal varieties’ of standard written English (299). Similar doubts seem to have beset Päivi Koivisto-Alanko, who investigates the use made by Chaucer of learned loan vocabulary in the semantic domain of cognition (e.g. conception, imagination, intellect, intelligence, science). As early as in the subtitle, the author raises the question whether the suprastandard, i.e. ‘the uppermost register’ (205) of a language ‘which has no part in the standard language of its day’ (220), is a nonstandard. In sum, this volume offers a wide range of viewpoints and approaches, with contributions of rather mixed scope and quality as well as pertinence to the subject. Nonetheless anyone interested in this subject is bound to find something of value in this book. Bernd Kortmann University of Freiburg, Germany Copyright...

Jewish Chicken Farmers in The Egg Basket of the World: The Creation of Cultural Identity in Petaluma, California

Jewish Chicken Farmers in The Egg Basket of the World: The Creation of Cultural Identity in Petaluma, California