Cross-cultural Friendship Research Articles

“Love, Alex”: Queering Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated

Abstract Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002) follows the two protagonists and narrators of the novel, American descendent of Holocaust survivors Jonathan and Alexander Perchov, his Ukrainian translator and collaborator on the story that constitutes the book itself. This article analyzes a heretofore unconsidered element of the novel: the potential to read Alex as queer. The book’s possible queer narrative is tragic, bittersweet at best, and overlooked by critics. This article illustrates how the character of Alex articulates what might be understood as a queer desire for Jonathan and considers new interpretive insights that might obtain within such a reading. In particular, it reconsiders the relationship between the men, as well as a critical stance that construes the novel’s concluding chapters as Jonathan’s rejection of cross-cultural friendship and collaboration. More important is the insight that a queer understanding of Everything Is Illuminated may provide with regard to the recent turn to the intersections between Jewish Studies and gender and LGBTQ+ theory. Understanding the potentially queer modes of Alex’s expression enables us to consider how Foer disrupts binary identity categories while also highlighting the dangers inherent in positing a reductive likeness between Alex and Jonathan—or between queer and Jewish identities.

Show me your friends, I'll tell you your emotions: Emotional fit of immigrant-origin minority youth in cross-cultural friendship networks.

The typical emotional responses to certain types of situations differ across cultures. Being reprimanded by your teacher in front of the class may be cause for anger and indignation among pupils in one cultural context, but for anger, shame, and possibly respect for the teacher among pupils in another cultural context. The consequence for immigrant-origin minorities is that they may not fit the emotions of the majority culture. Previous research has found that minorities who have majority contact have higher emotional fit with the majority culture. In the current study, we suggest that friendships with majority peers are particularly important to minorities' emotional fit. Students (945 minority and 1256 majority) from a representative sample of Belgian middle schools completed a sociometric questionnaire on their classroom friendships and rated their emotional experiences in two situations. Multilevel models yielded higher levels of emotional fit for minority youth with many (vs. few) majority friends as well as for minorities whose majority friends are connected (vs. less connected) to each other, or who are well-connected in the majority peer network. Having majority friends predicted emotional fit over and above majority contact in general.

Comic China: Representing Common Ground, 1890–1945

Comic China: Representing Common Ground, 1890–1945

Multiculturalism, biosemiotics, and cross-cultural friendship: An essay review of Olteanu’s multimodal semiotics of culture

Review of Multiculturalism as Multimodal Communication: A Semiotic Perspective [Series Numanities – Arts and Humanities in Progress 9; Dario Martinelli, series ed.] by Alin Olteanu. Cham: Springer, 2019, xviii+140 pp.

Cross-Cultural Friendship and Legal Pluralities in the Early Pacific Salt-Pork Trade

This article contributes to scholarship on the legal relationships between people in imperial and colonial settings through an analysis of the juridical meanings that could be found in the Tahitian word taio and its European cognate, friendship, in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I argue that taio provided a space for the negotiation of trade, sentiment, and authority across cultures; it was where European and Tahitian juridical traditions of friendship became entangled. Interrogating how missionaries, traders, and colonial administrators engaged with taio demonstrates the historiographical necessity of going beyond present-day European legal language to examine how non-European laws were taken up by imperial actors and shaped to create hybrid legal forms.

Friendship, Imperial Violence and the Law of Nations: The Case of Late-Eighteenth Century British Oceania

This article examines the interrelationship of friendship and violence in European juristic traditions and in British scientific voyaging in Oceania. Drawing upon Roman texts and natural law treatises, it shows how friendship, meaning hospitality and trade, appeared as a right asserted by imperial nations, often with the backing of force. Moving from jurisprudence to imperial practice, this article examines the coercive elements of cross-cultural friendship in eighteenth-century British expansion into Oceania. It suggests that it was in the breach more than the observance that discourses of friendship came to the fore, specifically in resistance to first contact and in accusations of theft. Seen to be motivated by either violent or avaricious passions, theft and native resistance tore the bonds of human sociability asunder. I argue that the significance of friendship was twofold. First, in a context of inter-imperial rivalry, friendship signified native consent in claims of possession over land and thus ensured conformity to legal norms. Second, it promised a system of order governed by norms of affective restraint that could sublimate the passions of natives, voyagers and nations.

Trading Sentiments

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the relationship between commerce, cross-cultural friendship and empire in the published Voyages of Pacific salt pork trader John Turnbull. Turnbull published two versions of his Voyages, the first in 1805 and the second in 1813. Through exposing the variations between the two versions of his Voyages and analysing the reception of each text in the burgeoning periodical literature at the time, I explore how his commercially oriented critiques of cross-cultural friendship transformed into unbridled enthusiasm in the second reprint. I explain this shift as both a consequence of a shift in genre, from commercial voyaging to scientific voyaging, and as a reflection of two competing ideas of the relationship between friendship and commerce. The first version reflects a Smithian ideal, where friendship is excluded from commerce, while the second version shows a natural law conception of friendship as commercial imperialism in its ideal, and morally virtuous, form.

Building friendship through a cross-cultural mentoring program

This paper examines the efficacy of a short-term mentoring program in building cross-cultural friendships between students at an Australian university. Using a quasi-experimental approach, our study found that the mentoring program (Local Aussie Mentoring Program—LAMP) increased cross-cultural interactions for mentees, but not for mentors. About 45% of both mentors and mentees wished to continue their relationship with mentoring partners after the completion of the mentoring requirements. Mentees spent significantly more time with cross-ethnic friends than did controls after the completion of LAMP. We examined whether multicultural aspects of personality, as measured by the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), would positively correlate with cross-cultural mentoring effectiveness and cross-cultural friendship interactions (the dependent variables). Multicultural personality aspects of mentors (as measured by the MPQ) had significant positive relationships with both mentee and mentor-rated mentoring measures. All mentor MPQ scales showed some significant but small and positive relationships, with mentor friendship items, particularly Open-mindedness, Cultural Empathy and Emotional Stability. We found a significant, positive relationship between mentee Cultural Empathy and Social Initiative with cross-cultural friendship. These results show some partial support for a positive relationship between MPQ scales and cross-ethnic friendships.

Africa's Place in World Christianity: Towards a Theology of Intercultural Friendship

Abstract: This article argues that the polycentric map of World Christianity challenges theologians and scholars of religion in Africa to concentrate on how local processes are reinforcing local idioms in the appropriation of Christian faith in Africa. It proposes some steps in the missional and historical interpretation of African Christianity and the cultural currents that drive Christian expansion in Africa. The essay argues that analyzing and locating the place of African Christianity in World Christianity should begin with showing the eschatological fruits of God's kingdom in African history and how these relate to and are different from versions of Christianity outside the African context. The essay concludes with some proposals on the possible contributions of African Christianity to World Christianity in the development of a theology of cross-cultural friendship needed to meet the challenges of an uncertain world.

How do the activities of international exchange group “Transcultural Exchange Association” affect the cross-cultural friendship development?

How do the activities of international exchange group “Transcultural Exchange Association” affect the cross-cultural friendship development?

Trading the Happy Object: Coffee, Colonialism, and Friendly Feeling

Trading the Happy Object: Coffee, Colonialism, and Friendly Feeling

Selected Demographics, Attitudes, and Beliefs About Diversity of Preservice Teachers

In this study, preservice teachers’ demographic variables such as race, innercity program experiences, religious affiliation, and cross-cultural friendships are examined to see if they influence the preservice teachers’ beliefs on issues of diversity. The data are from a Personal Beliefs About Diversity Scale and a Professional Beliefs About Diversity Scale. Analyses of the data indicate that religious denomination and cross-cultural friendship involvement as demographic variables significantly predicted scores on all the surveys. Another important finding of these analyses is a closing gap between students who had lower scores and higher scores on the presurveys by the end of the course.

A Diasporic Reading of <i>Nathan the Wise</i>

A Diasporic Reading of Nathan the Wise Ned Curthoys (bio) In this essay I analyze the continuing controversy surrounding Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous 1779 drama Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), an emblematic Enlightenment-era play whose evaluation has been drastically affected by the appalling history of the twentieth century. I argue that the Nazizeit and the Holocaust have produced a caesura in Nathan criticism, a dramatic reversal of the play's critical fortunes. A play that was once celebrated as a harbinger of German-Jewish emancipation, promising the creative participation of Jews in German society, is now harshly criticized and repudiated for the failure of that promise. Recent interpreters of Nathan the Wise, both scholars and playwrights, have been lugubriously mindful of the Nazi assault on the German-Jewish community that was launched in the early 1930s and of the subsequent European Jewish genocide.1 They read the play through the prism of the anachronistic stigma that attaches to German intellectual history, a stigma that has long encouraged post-Holocaust criticism to discuss German literature and culture in teleological ways, mining eighteenth and nineteenth century texts and discourses for attitudes and mentalities that prefigure the disaster of Nazi Germany. As I argue, this reversal in the critical fortunes of Nathan the Wise is by no means a salutary development, inasmuch as it has diminished our ability to appreciate the play's aesthetic merits, the cross-cultural friendship and creative collaboration that helped to produce it, the fertile intellectual milieu that informed it, and the significance of its historical setting in late twelfth-century Jerusalem, a Jerusalem under the benign Muslim sovereignty of the famed Egyptian sultan Saladin. In order to interpret Nathan the Wise, I suggest, a cosmopolitan sensitivity to world-historical time is required, a genealogical sensibility that reads the play as an enthusiastic commentary on the pluralistic and polyglot societies of the Levant and [End Page 70] Moorish Spain, in which a convivencia, a sometimes fragile but productive coexistence of Muslim, Jew, and Christian, was capable of provoking and edifying Christian Europe. Nathan the Wise Lessing's Nathan the Wise is set in approximately the year 1192 CE in Jerusalem during an uneasy peace in the Third Crusade, a peace engineered by the wise sultan Saladin, a much-lauded historical figure who regained Jerusalem from Christian crusaders in 1187 CE. Saladin invited Jews to resettle in Jerusalem under his protection and guaranteed freedom of pilgrimage and worship to Christians. The play's chief protagonists are the wise, generous, and humane Jewish merchant Nathan; the initially anti-Jewish but brave and honorable Christian Knight Templar who, just before the play's action begins, has saved Nathan's adopted daughter Recha from an inferno; and Saladin, the noble-minded ruler of Jerusalem who fears crusading Christians and is tempted to financially exploit Nathan's wealth and credit. The play has an episodic narrative structure and is difficult to classify; it is a "problem play" that is neither comedy, drama, or tragedy. What the play does enact is a sometimes meandering journey toward the reconciliation of three characters, a Muslim, a Jew, and a Christian, whose real human virtues threaten to be overwhelmed by the historical and institutional realities of religious hatred. Nathan the Wise is most famous for the parable of the rings in act 3. The profligately generous Saladin, after successfully waging war to recapture Jerusalem, is heavily in debt and needs credit from the famously wise, humane, and financially astute Jewish merchant Nathan. The parable is Nathan's artful response to Saladin's attempt to put pressure on him by asking him the most fraught question of all, which is the one true religion, and why has a wise and independent man capable of choosing what is best chosen to remain a Jew? Nathan's initial panic articulates the profound dilemma of how to defend one's position in the world in an age that inhibits individual and secular conceptions of identity: I must be on my guard. But how?I can't insist that I'm a Jew; but to [End Page 71] Deny that I'm a Jew would be still worse.Then he...

Bog Child (review)

Reviewed by: Bog Child Elizabeth Bush Dowd, Siobhan; Bog Child. Fickling/Random House, 2008; [336p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-385-75170-4 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-385-75169-8 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8–12 It’s Ireland in the 1980s, and each trip across the border between Fergus McCann’s Northern Irish village and the south involves some risk. When Fergus and Uncle Tally make an early morning jaunt to spirit off a bit of peat for sale back in the village, they unearth a body that appears to be that of a child, possibly an ancient child. A not entirely truthful report to the authorities brings in the police and, shortly thereafter, archaeologists, and the McCanns find themselves renting rooms to an archaeologist and her teenage daughter. Fergus would like to simply prepare for his A levels and follow the progress of the excavation (and flirtatious Cora), but the Troubles have burdened his family with grief. Fergus’ brother is in jail on a hunger strike, and his brother’s old pal has enlisted, then blackmailed, Fergus into smuggling packages across the border on his morning runs. Dowd handles multiple plot strands with ease, interweaving such weighty issues as family and ethnic loyalty and the ethics of political dissent with the more mundane problems of cross-cultural friendship and the need to separate from family to pursue opportunity. Fergus’ dreams about “bog child” Mel offer a window into her possible past but never quite cross into a haunting, and a deft plot twist involving Fergus’s smuggling further draws the elements of political thriller into the believable realm of teen experience. American readers in need of more background to absorb the political details of the novel will need to pursue research on their own, but a brief note on the IRA and the 1981 hunger strike provides some context with which to start. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Justifying Cross-Cultural Friendship: Bohemond, Firuz, and the Fall of Antioch

The friendship between Bohemond, one of the leaders of the First Crusade, and Firuz, a Muslim resident of the city of Antioch, was militarily important, but philosophically difficult from the perspective of Latin Christian chroniclers writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries because it did not conform to Western ideals of friendship. Therefore, in order to make this relationship more palatable to them and their audience, the chroniclers used two main strategies. Either they asserted that Firuz’s social class and/or religion were the same as Bohemond’s, thus making him conform more closely to the Christian chroniclers’ idea of an acceptable choice of friend; or they enhanced the image of Bohemond’s power, thus turning the relationship, like the military victory, into a triumph of Christians over Muslims.

Commentary: Can You Take Undergraduates to the Field? A Field School Example

We are in a Rarámuri rancho in the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, Mexico when one of the eight undergraduate students participating in the ethnographic field school starts whooping with joy. He has just spoken a Rarámuri word/concept he learned in my ethnography class to one of the Tarahumara children following us around, and the youth has responded. The anthropology major, a junior, has an intellectual epiphany as he sees how his classroom experience holds meaning here. The geology-archaeology major has admitted earlier that her only goal in attending the field school was to go down into Canyon de Chelly instead of looking at it from above. She says she is not really interested in indigenous people- she prefers rocks. She spends the next day with an older Hopi woman. During their time together the young geologist and the older basket maker share life stories and so begins a meaningful and ongoing cross cultural friendship.

Toward Global Community: The Twins Series of Lucy Fitch Perkins

Toward Global Community:The Twins Series of Lucy Fitch Perkins Claudia Mills (bio) In her 1990 Newbery acceptance speech for Number the Stars, set in World War II Denmark, Lois Lowry notes that her "entire knowledge of cultural geography [as a child] came from the books by Lucy Fitch Perkins. I probably thought that all children in foreign countries were twins. I read about the Belgian Twins, and the Scottish Twins, and the Dutch Twins, and if there were Danish Twins in that series—I no longer remember—then I read about the Danish Twins as well" (415). Lowry is not alone in her experience: Perkins's well-loved series of Twins books shaped the cultural awareness of several generations of American youth from the second decade of the century, when the first Twins books appeared, through the late 1960s, when a number of the titles were reprinted by Walker & Co. In Perkins's lifetime alone, over two million Twins books were in print (E. Perkins viii). Thus, it is worth evaluating the Twins' legacy, in particular the attitudes toward other peoples and places that they project, as our own debate continues over the appropriate avenues for advancing the aims of multiculturalism.1 In all, Perkins wrote and illustrated twenty-six Twins books, from The Dutch Twins in 1911 (which generated two sequels), through The Chinese Twins, published in 1936, the year before her death.2 Perkins used the Twins device to teach both history (The Cave Twins, The Spartan Twins, The Puritan Twins, The Pioneer Twins, The Colonial Twins of Virginia, The American Twins of 1812, The American Twins of the Revolution) and geography. But her heart plainly lay in the geographical books in the series, which introduced young readers to Dutch, Japanese, Irish, Eskimo, Mexican, Belgian, French, Scotch, Italian, Swiss, Filipino, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese Twins, as well as to Indian and, yes, Pickaninny Twins. Perkins's aim of creating cross-cultural friendship is perhaps most perfectly captured in the introductory illustrations to the early books in the series, in which we see the Dutch Twins and the Japanese Twins curtsying to each other, or a group made up of Dutch Twins, Japanese Twins, and Irish Twins greeting their newest friends, the Eskimo Twins. Although her lasting fame rests on the Twins series, Perkins began her career as an artist and illustrator. Born in Maples, Indiana, in 1865, she studied at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston from 1883 to 1886 before joining the faculty at the newly founded Pratt Institute School of Fine Arts in Brooklyn, where she served from 1887 until her marriage in 1891 to the architect Dwight Heald Perkins. Her body of achievement in children's illustration includes a series of lavishly illustrated classic tales as well as steady textbook work. The latter exposed Perkins to contemporary reform movements in the field of education; her daughter, Eleanor Ellis Perkins, reports that in the course of her freelance career Perkins "taught, lectured, edited, published, illustrated, made mural decorations to enliven school-rooms, and was an excited part of the great enthusiasm that produced modern education" (221). The original impetus for the Twins series seems to have been in large part commercial. According to her daughter, "the idea for The Dutch Twins came almost without volition on [Lucy Perkins's] part" (224), inspired by the suggestion of a publisher friend who admired quick sketches she had made of little Dutch children to accompany stories told to her four-year-old son. Likewise, momentum for continuing the series through some two and a half decades was fueled by its enormous financial success. Toward the end Perkins begged her editors to allow her to terminate her "twin existence"; they responded that she was welcome to develop other projects "as long as you give us a new Twin story by June first every year in time for the fall catalogue and the pre-Christmas sale" (E. Perkins 234). Contemporary reviews of the books by and large praised their charm, humor, and "atmosphere," rather than appraising them as potential instruments of cultural change.3 But the books clearly reflect a driving sense of mission as well. Perkins herself...