Cultural Crossroads Research Articles

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto: A Bilingual Edition

Italian literature is usually neglected by ecocriticism. This lack of attention is only partly explained by the fact that Italian ecocritical studies are few and recent. The main reason might be that Italian literature entails ecocritical questions of its own, in which the environment is present more as a crossroads of history, society, and culture than as a focus for nature writing. Italian literature thus appears to be the environmentally sensitive scholar as an unexploited resource. Patrick Barron is perfectly aware of this opportunity. His collection of Andrea Zanzotto's poetry and prose follows in the footsteps of Italian Environmental Literature, a useful anthology of Italian environmental literature that he co-edited in 2003 with Anna Re. Some poems by Zanzotto were already included in this earlier book. Born in 1921, Zanzotto is considered Italy's most influential living poet. His writing deals with many subjects, from linguistics and landscape to political historiography and the natural sciences. His life and work resonate within a complex socio-political and cultural moment of Italian history. As Barron notes in his introduction, Zanzotto “straddles generations and historical geographical realities—specifically the shift from a pre-war, largely agrarian, and dialectal Italy to the current highly industrialized and urbanized one” (2). In this shift, Zanzotto molds his artistic personality by shaping his own “tradition”—one consisting of earlier and recent poetry (from Dante and Petrarch to Vittorio Sereni and Pier Paolo Pasolini, passing through Hölderlin, Rilke, and García Lorca), as well as theoretical stances taken from postmodernism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis (Barthes, Heidegger, Lacan, Freud). Most of all, Zanzotto builds the bridge between language and landscape that has characterized his work since his first book, Dietro il paesaggio (Behind the Landscape), was published in 1951.

The East Asian "Mediterranean": Maritime Crossroads of Culture, Commerce and Human Migration

The East Asian "Mediterranean": Maritime Crossroads of Culture, Commerce and Human Migration

Puerto Rico: A Cultural Crossroads

You have accessThe ASHA LeaderFeature1 Nov 2008Puerto Rico: A Cultural Crossroads Albert Villanueva-ReyesEdD, CCC-SLP Albert Villanueva-Reyes Google Scholar More articles by this author , EdD, CCC-SLP https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.FTR5.13152008.38 SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In As a result of its Caribbean location, Puerto Rico is a crossroads of Hispanic and Anglo cultures. Our small island has been part of the United States since 1898 and our residents have been U.S. citizens since 1917. This Spanish-English bilingual community uses U.S. currency; no visas or passports are needed to enter the island from the mainland. My parents were part of the wave of Puerto Ricans who migrated to New York City in the 1950s. At age 7 I returned to the island with my family and can’t imagine living anywhere else. I assumed the chair of the Speech-Language Pathology Program at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), and during my tenure the academic program regained accreditation from the Council on Academic Accreditation (CAA), which it had lost nine years earlier. This status was of major significance, as many professionals from the island often travel to the mainland for jobs that may require ASHA’s Certificate of Clinical Competence (CCC). Academic Program Development The history of speech-language pathology and audiology in Puerto Rico dates back to the 1960s, when Cruz A. Cancel founded the master’s programs at UPR, which continued to expand after NicolásLinares assumed leadership. There are two other graduate programs in speech-language pathology in Puerto Rico: Universidad del Turabo (CAA candidacy status) and Universidad Carlos Albizu (nonaccredited). There are no doctoral programs in speech-language pathology. UPR has the only audiology academic program, which has recently converted to an AuD program, reflecting changes in entry-level requirements for the profession. The lack of PhD programs in either profession poses challenges for academic programs in attracting doctoral-level faculty and researchers. A master’s degree is the entry-level requirement for SLPs on the island. In response to the great shortage of SLPs in Puerto Rico, the “speech-language therapist” (SLT) position was created in the early 1980s. After earning a bachelor’s degree and passing a state exam, an SLT may provide services under the supervision of an SLP to clients under 21 years old. Work Settings Most SLPs and SLTs work in the schools. Because of personnel shortages, school-based services are often provided through contracts with private practices. Some clinicians also work in rehabilitation settings, but hospital-based employment is uncommon with the exception of the Veterans Administration hospital. Audiologists are employed in a variety of settings, most commonly in private practice. Access to services for all populations remains a struggle, which is an issue of concern to the local professional association for audiologists and speech-language pathologists. Of more than 800 communication and sciences disorders professionals here, only 132 SLPs hold the CCC-SLP, 25 audiologists hold the CCC-A, and five clinicians hold the CCC-SLP/A. The greatest hurdle is passing the Praxis exam, which is offered only in English and includes content that is sometimes inappropriate to the practice on the island. As chair of the Multicultural Issues Board and co-founder of the Hispanic Caucus, Luis Riquelme worked with ASHA and the Council for Clinical Certification in Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, which granted special permission for Puerto Rican clinicians to apply for the ASHA-CCC as “foreign applicants” for a one-year period, allowing these applicants to earn the CCC even if they graduated from UPR during the nine-year period in which the program lost its CAA accreditation. As a bilingual community, Puerto Rico continues to prepare a significant number of bilingual SLPs and audiologists who collaborate with professionals on the U.S. mainland. This article also received contributions from Luis F. Riquelme, MS, CCC-SLP, assistant professor at New York Medical College (Valhalla), director of Riquelme & Associates, PC, and director of the Center for Swallowing and Speech-Language Pathology at New York Methodist Hospital (Brooklyn). Contact him at [email protected]. Author Notes Albert Villanueva-Reyes, EdD, CCC-SLP, is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and specializes in normal and disordered voice. Contact him at [email protected]. Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetails Volume 13Issue 15November 2008 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in print: Nov 1, 2008 Metrics Downloaded 292 times Topicsasha-topicsleader_do_tagasha-article-typesCopyright & Permissions© 2008 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationLoading ...

Imperial Fantasies, Colonial Realities: Contesting Power and Culture in Italian Eritrea

There is today widespread recognition that colonialism was ultimately about the institutionalization of an imaginary of profound social inequality anchored in relations of production and asymmetries of power that were justified by ideologies of racial superiority. The assertion of the final alterity of the colonized was crucial to this imaginary and entailed the construction of a social and political order founded on a multidimensional polarity. But the taxonomies of difference that structured these polarities were never as fixed or impermeable as the colonizers imagined them to be. It was in actuality precisely along the indeterminate boundaries between those categories of rule—at the crossroads of politics and culture—that everyday challenges to colonial hegemony were vitally posed, casting doubt on its founding myths and forms of power. My intention in this essay is to explore this cultural politics of colonialism in the context of Italian Eritrea. The emphasis will be on the period after the demise of a settler colonial project, which came to an abrupt end in the face of peasant resistance and Italian military defeat at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. The rupture of the settler project and the forced political retreat made it particularly difficult to sustain the distinctions on which colonial power rested. The subsequent fashioning of a new colonial project was indelibly marked by the experience of defeat that haunted the Italian colonial imagination, which makes Eritrea a particularly propitious context for examining the “tensions of empire.”

Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870 (review)

Reviewed by: Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870 Robert A. Nye Staffan Müller-WilleHans-Jörg Rheinberger, eds. Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. x + 496 pp. Ill. $50.00 (978-0-262-13476-7). This multiauthor volume originated from a long-term collaborative project initiated by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. It is the first in a series of planned volumes on the history of heredity from the early modern period to the present that will focus on the cultural, legal, and practical origins of modern heredity. The present volume examines various themes in the early modern era, ending at about 1870 on the threshold of Mendelian genetics. The introductory essay attempts to provide some unity to what is in fact a very diverse set of subjects and approaches to hereditarian thought and practice. The editors group the eighteen chapters of the book in sections pertaining to law, medicine, breeding and hybridization, generation and evolution, and anthropology, but apart from exercising a certain amount of control over the form each chapter takes, they have allowed authors a considerable amount of freedom to concentrate on particular subjects that do not always clearly demonstrate the overall themes of the volume. Nonetheless, almost all of these well-documented and clearly written chapters contribute something to our understanding of the cultural origins of heredity. The contemporary meaning of the term itself, the transmission of traits in organic reproduction, is of quite recent provenance. The problem this volume seeks to analyze is the remarkably late development of scientific theories of inheritance in contrast with many other disciplinary fields in the life sciences. Why did “genetics” appear only around 1900 when embryology, cytology, and evolutionary biology were already mature fields? The editors develop the notions of “epistemic space” and “knowledge regime” to describe the complex body of speculation and practice that surrounded conception, pregnancy, embryonic development, parturition, and lactation, to speak only of the human aspects of the phenomena that were historically linked to the transmission of particular qualities from parent to child. Various authors demonstrate how metaphors for understanding heredity were drawn from the legal theories and practices that governed the inheritance of land and goods, initially on a patriarchal and patrilineal model but from the late eighteenth century on a model based on affinal patterns of inheritance reflecting an increasing marital endogamy throughout Europe. Hereditarian thought, in other words, moved gradually from a vertical axis in which individuals were believed to be the product of a genealogical lineage to a horizontal one in which the emphasis was on difference from generation to generation. Throughout much of early modern times, the biology and character of living things were identified with the places that gave rise to them, making it a matter of relative indifference whether their natures were determined by “nature” or “nurture.” Much room was left for “epigenetic” explanations of individual peculiarities that might diverge from the norm, and thus there was little incentive to formulate [End Page 733] general rules of inheritance. However, with a rise in social and economic mobility, travel, and the discovery and exchange of plants and zoological specimens in the eighteenth century, the ancient connection between place and character began to dissolve, and it was possible to begin more serious speculations and experiments aimed at distinguishing between the contributions of genitor and environment. This development focused the attention of doctors on anomalies, particularly inherited diseases; the efforts to understand their patterns of appearance inspired the compilation of pedigrees that tracked the degeneration of breeding lines—animal, plant, and human—and the equal possibility of their improvement, which led, as we know, to the rule-of-thumb breeding practices that inspired Darwin’s notion of artificial selection. There are excellent chapters on the inheritance of mental illnesses, proclivities to alcoholism, and gout, and, on the improving side, chapters on strawberry hybrids, sheep, and the ideology of the “self-made man,” all examples of praxis informed by ad hoc theorizing. As Ohad S. Parnes summarizes the nature of pre-Mendelian...

Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870. Edited by Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2007) 496 pp. $50.00

<i>Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870</i>. Edited by Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2007) 496 pp. $50.00

Chandani Lokuge's If the Moon Smiled: Female Subjectivity and Trauma at the South Asian/Australian Cultural Crossroads

(2008). Chandani Lokuge's If the Moon Smiled: Female Subjectivity and Trauma at the South Asian/Australian Cultural Crossroads. South Asian Review: Vol. 29, Perspectives on South Asian Women's Writing, pp. 45-63.

Photography after the Incidents

Photography after the Incidents

The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Ethnographic Readings: Narrative Complexity in Things Fall Apart

This article seeks to complicate the rhetoric of "the cultural insider" that surrounds Chinua Achebe and to interrogate readings of Things Fall Apart (TFA) that assume the novel provides an unmediated ethnographic perspective on a traditional African culture. It argues that Achebe's self-professed position at the "cultural crossroads" is manifest in the narrative voice of TFA, as the narrator oscillates from situating himself as a participant in Igbo culture to an observer, looking at the culture from the outside. In this way, this article shows that Achebe's position vis-Ã -vis the Igbo does exemplify many of the dilemmas of ethnographic observation—if we understand the relationship between the observer and the observed to be more complicated, and sometimes fraught, than most anthropological readings of the novel assume. By exploring the complexities inherent in the ethnographic relationship, this reading sheds light on the unappreciated dynamism of the narrative voice of TFA.

Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870

Reviewed by: Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870 Laura Miller (bio) Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberg, eds. Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. 496 pp. $52. Deep passions among relatives, wayward kin attempting to claim inheritance, tasty strawberries, and sheepherding are not solely the territory of Thomas Hardy. Instead, these are among the topics addressed in Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870, an ambitious collection in the Transformations series from MIT Press. Heredity Produced, edited by Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, has an interesting lineage of its own. Since 2001, the editors have been part of a research project at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin that investigates heredity's cultural history. This collection includes essays from participants in the institute's workshops, as well as solicited contributions from other scholars. Heredity Produced contains nineteen essays and is organized into five sections: Heredity In the Legal Context; Heredity and Medicine; Natural History, Breeding, and Hybridization; Theories of Generation and Evolution; and Anthropology. For those who teach undergraduate history of science classes, or who have a more general interest in the topic, the editors have announced that a companion volume, aimed at a broader audience, is in preparation. One goal of this collection is to understand how the "knowledge regime" (15) of heredity functioned during the centuries prior to its conceptual solidity. Power, legality, and race—topics important in contemporary discussions of heredity—are also crucial to a historical understanding of heredity. The collection sets out to evaluate the turning points that helped compose this knowledge regime, per its title situating itself "at the crossroads of biology, politics and culture." Each of the collection's contributors peers down one, two, or sometimes all three, avenues of this crossroads. [End Page 144] The collection is strong on biology, even in unlikely places. Readers who bypass the section on Heredity in the Legal Context to concentrate on Heredity and Medicine would miss relevant information: David Warren Sabean's descriptions of the ways that Galenic or Aristotelian views were reproduced in discourses on early modern marriage and Silvia De Renzi's analysis of when physical resemblance began to be used as evidence in paternity cases. In the section on Heredity and Medicine, Carlos López-Beltrán tracks the term "heredity"'s transformation from being used as a metaphor for understanding traits to being understood as a cause of those traits. López-Beltrán considers the ways that changes in medical discourse from 1600 to 1800 both influenced and were influenced by changing perspectives on inheritance. Later in the volume, Ohad S. Parnes considers a similarly shifting perspective from the standpoint of genetics: "the establishment of heredity as a universal scientific category was the direct result of a wider epistemological shift . . . namely, the conceptualization of populations in terms of generations" (316). Within the field of biology, the collection's other topics range from Philip K. Wilson's analysis of Erasmus Darwin's writings on gout to François Duchesneau's considerations of why cell theory and heredity were slow to align. Whereas Roger J. Wood studies changes in the ways sheep breeders understood inbreeding as a useful preparatory step to controlling the breeding process, Nicolas Pethes considers a different sort of animal experiment in "'Victor, enfant de la forêt': Experiments on Heredity in Savage Children." Marc J. Ratcliff studies Antoine-Nicolas Duchesne, who engaged with several disciplines, "the grower's know-how, botanical theory, and aristocratic conceptions of descent" (207), in the construction of a genealogical tree for strawberries. Rather than giving the impression of a random series of unconnected essays, the studies in this volume share rigorous methodologies and compelling interpretations of how heredity evolved as a concept. Broader essays, such as Staffan Müller-Wille's "Figures of Inheritance: 1650–1800," illustrate long-term developments in the understanding of genealogy. Müller-Wille uses figures such as William Harvey, Linnaeus, and Charles Darwin to depict "a shift from vertical relations of descent to horizontal...

Islands, Literature, and Cultural Translatability

This essay provides a historical overview of the island tradition in European literature and links it specifically to the notion of cultural translatability and the idea of the floating island as a floating signifier with a focus on canonical writers from Greco-Roman antiquity to the contemporary period, and finally using the example of the Caribbean to discuss islands in a post-colonial and global perspective. Island spaces are used to explore and create bridges between the real and the imaginary as a response to cultural and social realities, frequently taking the form of utopias/dystopias, Edens, Arcadias, nations, metatexts, cultural crossroads. The virtual spaces of islands are susceptible to translatability and articulate perspectives on the shifting relationship between self and other, center and periphery, serving as sites of mediation between cultures. Within an increasingly global culture marked by inequalities and differences, islands may induce a contrapuntal approach to literary and cultural criticism.

Heredity produced: at the crossroads of biology, politics, and culture, 1500-1870

Preface -- Introduction -- 1. Heredity: the formation of an epistemic space / Staffan Muller-Wille and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger -- I. Heredity in the legal context -- 2. From clan to kindred: kinship and the circulation of property in premodern and modern Europe / David Warren Sabean -- 3. Resemblance, paternity, and imagination in early modern courts / Silvia De Renzi -- 4. Continuity and death: literature and the law of succession in the nineteenth century / Ulrike Vedder -- II. Heredity and medicine -- 5. The medical origins of heredity / Carlos Lopez-Beltran -- 6. Erasmus Darwin and the noble disease (gout): conceptualizing heredity and disease in enlightenment England / Philip K. Wilson -- 7. Degeneration and alienism in early nineteenth-century France / Laure Cartron -- III. Natural history, breeding, and hybridization -- 8. Figures of inheritance, 1650-1850 / Staffan Muller-Wille -- 9. Duchesne's strawberries: between growers' practices and academic knowledge / Marc J. Ratcliff -- 10. The sheep breeders' view of heredity before and after 1800 / Roger J. Wood -- IV. Theories of generation and evolution -- 11. Speculation and experiment in enlightenment life sciences / Mary Terrall -- 12. Kant on heredity and adaptation / Peter McLaughlin -- 13. The delayed linkage of heredity with the cell theory / Francois Duchesneau -- 14. On the shoulders of generations: the new epistemology of heredity in the nineteenth century / Ohad S. Parnes -- V. Anthropology -- 15. Las castas: interracial crossing and social structure, 1770-1835 / Renato G. Mazzolini -- 16. Acquired character: the hereditary material of the self-made man / Paul White -- 17. Victor, l'enfant de la foret: experiments on heredity in savage children / Nicolas Pethes -- 18. Sui generis: heredity and heritage of genius at the turn of the eighteenth century / Stefan Willer -- Epilogue -- 19. The heredity of poetics / Helmut Muller-Sievers -- List of contributors -- Index

Leading authentically at the cross-roads of culture and context

This article explores the difficulties Hong Kong school leaders face in leading authentically and suggests that a key to seeking this authenticity lies in ongoing learning in context. It is divided into three sections. The first section describes the crossroads of reform and culture in Hong Kong schools by illustrating the tension between traditional values and modern reform demands. It concludes that the environment within which Hong Kong leaders lead is best characterized by hybridity and that this makes becoming authentic both important and difficult. The second section asserts that being an authentic leader is not a matter of adopting a model, a series of actions or even a set of beliefs, but is about engaging in a continual learning process. Some of what we know about leadership learning is discussed, as is the importance of accounting for cultural variation when designing learning approaches. The third section outlines and describes a set of generic leadership learning gateways designed to guide the development of authenticity. These gateways underpin a new programme implemented in Hong Kong which consciously aims to allow principals to construct authenticity.

My Petersburg/Myself: Mental Architecture and Imaginative Space in Modern Russian Letters by Anna Lisa s&gt; Crone Jennifer Day (review)

REVIEWS 337 This is a very detailed study of demonological references in Dostoevskii's works, but the focus is soft:just as Bakhtin sees thresholds everywhere and Freudianssee phallic symbols, so Leatherbarrowtends to see the demonic in everydayobjectsand acts. Given all this devilryit is a reliefat the end to learn of Dostoevskii'sown scepticism, when he writes: 'My whole problem is that there is no way I can bring myself to believe in devils myself' (p. I79). The opening chapter examines the role of the demonic in Dostoevskii's early writing, and each of the following chapters is devoted to one of the major novels in turn. In Crime andPunishment, Leatherbarrownotes that, in explainingthe murder to Sonia, Raskol'nikovsubstituteschert for d'iavolperhaps to show his unwillingness to allow conventional religiousovertones into discussionof his crime. Moreover, it is perhapsNapoleon as beshe has in mind, not Sonia's Orthodox d'iavol. In The Idiot the question of apocalypse looms large, and here Leatherbarrowhas some interestingobservationson names the symbolism of horses and birds,and he arguesthat the surnameof NastasiaFiippovna Barashkova(suggesting'lamb'),castsher both as whore (ofBabylon)and lamb (of Christ). The novel TheDevilsyieldsthe most obviousmaterialfor the theme, placing it in a political context. The demonic characteristicsof the arch 'devil' Petr Verkhovenskiiare likened to a puppet bearing the diminutiveof his name the Petrushkaof street theatre. In ne Brothers Karamazov the somewhat heretical ideas of Zosima are discussed and there is a fine analysis of how three sections of the monk's teaching have relevance for each of the brothers in turn, but it comes as a surprisethat after such exegesis Leatherbarrowshould assertthat this section 'The Russian Monk' 'never really belongs. It remains a cuckoo in the nest, a piece of artisticsleightof hand' (p. I76).Even more surprisingis his concluding statement:'In his attempts [...] to use the demonic form of the novel in the service of the Lord, it is perhaps Dostoevsky himselfwho emerges as the true "fatherof the lie" in the Brothers Karamazov' (p. I77).'The devil is in the detail'is an adage that could well be appliedto this study:it is a crowdedbook in a crowded field. Nevertheless, it does offer some real insights. Department ofRussianStudies RicHARD PEACE University ofBristol Crone, Anna Lisa and Day, Jennifer. My Petersburg/Mysel: MentalArchitecture andImaginative Spacein ModemRussianLetters. Slavica, Bloomington, IN, 2004. 385 pp. Notes. Indexes. $29.95 (paperback). IN his book, ThePracticeof Evegyday Life (Berkeley, CA, I984), Michel de Certeau demonstrateshow the tactical use of cultural forms enables individuals to elude and resist the power of social determination. The creation of various counter-hegemonic rituals and stylistic practices makes possible the articulationof a playful element in the deterministicsocial space. In My 338 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 Petersburg/Myself Anna Lisa Crone andJennifer Day explore, in terms similar to de Certeau, Petersburgwriters'identificationof their selfwith urban spaces and their poetic dialogueswith the Petersburgtradition.They discussRussian twentieth-centurypoets and writers,includingAndrey Belyi, Vassili Rozanov, Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel'shtam and Joseph Brodsky,who were 'otheredinto or unto urban space' (p. 2). The book investigates the metapoetic function that 'entails the equation by poets of their artisticworks(poems)with Petersburgbuildingsand statues'(p. I7). Crone ancl Day's discussionof Mandel'shtam'svision of the Admiralty,BenedictLifshits's image of the Kazan' cathedral, and Alexander Blok's elegiac identifications with Petersburglandscapesare especiallyrewarding.It is surprisingnot to see any analysis of Andrei Bitov's short stories which stand close to the urban writing of Alexander Kushner and Brodsky. Crone and Day also do not engage with Maria Rubins's excellent comparative study Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ekphrasis InRussian andFrench Poet?y (New York, 2000) that discusses numerous examples of ekphrasis in Russian poetry. Both books explore the construction of self and the interplay between the Russian and European culturaltraditions. Crone's and Day's study comprises four chapters. The first chapter 'Towards a Theory of Identificationwith PetersburgSpace' brings together Fedor Dostoevskii, Akhmatova, Mandel'shtam, Vladimir Maiakovskii and Lifshits.Crone and Day offer close reading of various texts. They provocatively say that 'to present the besieged Petersburgand the Petersburgwriter as stable and indestructible,writers take the unexpected tack of resortingto urban Petersburgidyll and the closely related urban elegy...

Swoosh identity: recontextualizations in Haiti and Romania

Since its creation in 1971 in the USA, the Nike swoosh has rapidly become a widely recognized and worshiped symbol of achievement, of the American dream of success and mobility, and it has constantly been part of a process of commodity-mediated identity co-construction. In small markets such as Haiti and Romania that are on the fringes of the wider global market, the swoosh symbol is freely appropriated and recontextualized by the local ‘flawed consumers’, who lack the financial means to participate in the identity-for-purchase ritual that the corporation thrives on. Instead, the swoosh - domesticated, through mechanical or manual reproductions - takes on a hybrid of local and global values. The avatars of the swoosh that we examine in this article are found at Romanian and Haitian cultural crossroads, and illustrate the dialectic of identity/community membership construction, and processes of geosemiotics. The identity of the sign undergoes metamorphoses and meaning crossfertilizations, thus undermining corporate hegemony and allowing the sign's local producers and users to symbolically transcend the local dimension and to join a u-topic community of affluent consumers.

Metamorphosis from a Distance

Metamorphosis from a Distance Thomas Rimer The particular language I work from is Japanese. Even languages closer to English—French, Spanish, and so forth—despite their affinities, still possess areas of expression that need some sort of domestication into English in order to prove themselves effective [End Page 366] when spoken on the stage. And how much more so is that true of a language such as Japanese, which, other than for some imported slang, bears so little resemblance to English either in vocabulary or rhythm. Some of the stumbling blocks, such as the fact that verbs generally come at the end of sentences, find parallels in German and other languages. In addition, there are certain features of the language that really do cause special problems. Generally speaking, English is a much more specific language; the Japanese language spoken in the theatre gains much of its power from its very ambiguity, and any translator must perforce trim back those suggested overtones, leaving a sometimes luxurious tree with only a few bare branches. In general, to make a rough analogy from those stages of cultural accommodation outlined by Patrice Pavis in his Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, I have generally found that the emphasis for me in creating a usable translation must be placed on what the spectator can be expected to usefully receive, rather than on attempting to maintain any overly stern fidelity to the nuances of the original.25 During the course of many years I have worked to translate theatre texts both from contemporary and classical Japanese, and I have translated a certain number of critical texts from both as well. Let me make a few observations about all four categories. In terms of modern, certainly postwar plays, the issues at stake are obvious though perhaps banal. One of them concerns slang. While it is true that all translations date, it seems to me that, given the relatively few Japanese plays that have been translated and published in English, the results should be as durable as possible. What this means to me, at least, is that, even in the case of colorful language in the original, slang should be rendered in such a fashion that the English-language text won't seem out of date and even embarrassing in, say, ten years. This strategy certainly represents a compromise, but in my view a necessary one. Another problem lies in the fact that in many modern and contemporary Japanese plays, the sentences are occasionally longer and more complex than American actors may be prepared to deliver with the requisite panache. So I often break them up. And then, of course, there are those terrible moments where a playwright will quote a European author in Japanese translation, with the poor translator trying to guess what the original might be. In a translation I am now working on of a beautiful 1953 play by Tanaka Chikao, Kyôiku (Education), I am still in the process of trying to locate some citations from Baudelaire, translated into Japanese using sometimes obscure characters, so that I can put those phrases into the dialogue where they belong (in either French or English—we'll see). But then, come to think of it, what US playwright these days would have his characters quote French poetry anyway? Larger cultural questions lurk beneath. In translating classic texts, there are certain models or traditions of translation, set by early masters such as Arthur Waley, to which most of us still adhere or occasionally flout, as did Royall Tyler (whose work I admire enormously) in his early translations of medieval Japanese nô plays. His later ones, which can be found in a first-rate 1992 Penguin paperback, Japanese Nô Dramas, draw both on the principles employed in his more fanciful originals and on more standard approaches. [End Page 367] Perhaps the most significant issue in translating classical Japanese theatre texts centers on the fact that, from a Western perspective, nô, bunraku (the eighteenth-century puppet theatre), and kabuki texts resemble more the librettos to operas than they do any fully sustained dramatic texts. Nô in particular is often described as a kind of total theatre, involving text, music, dance...

Geographies of Intertextuality : Buddhist Literature in Pre-modern Siam

Geographies of Intertextuality : Buddhist Literature in Pre-modern Siam. Peter Skilling. Far from being marginal or provincial, Southeast Asia— this land "between India and China"— was a cultural crossroads, with intricate links by land and sea with the wider world. In the geographic imagination, Southeast Asia was located in Jambudvīpa, the "Southern Continent" of Buddhist cosmology. The article examines the Buddhist literature of the region, in particular the Pāli and vernacular literature of Siam. It hopes to show that Siam was part of a wider textual and cultural community, which was in constant dialogue with the Indian Ocean region and beyond. It proposes that vibrant cultural exchange was the norm rather than the exception, and that this exchange contributed to the exuberant creativity of Siamese and Tai literature. It suggests that we should look more closely at literary production in order to understand the intellectual and social history of Siam in broader transregional contexts.

The Port of Geba: at the crossroads of Afro-Atlantic trade and culture

The Port of Geba: at the crossroads of Afro-Atlantic trade and culture

Heredity Produced. At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870

Heredity Produced. At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870

Strega Nona's Ethnic Alchemy: Magic Pasta, Stregheria and That Amazing Disappearing "N"

Introduction The children's book illustrator and writer Tomie dePaola had already made the grandmother figure the focus of his 1972 Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs when, in 1975, at the height of the season of American ethnic pride, he doodled the character that would become Nona, or Grandma Witch. Based in part on his own Italian American grandmother Concetta, and spawning a total of eight books to date, the Strega Nona series of children's picture books has become a fascinating component of Italian American identity creation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and an example of how Italian Americans acculturate their children to this identity within the context of the children's literature genre. That dePaola has chosen this mode for ethnic expression is indicative of his position at a cultural crossroads. Children's literature--and the post-industrial childhood literacy that it assumes--is part and parcel of the affluence to which many Italian Americans now have access, but which was not part of the typically poor Southern culture of their immigrant Italian forebears. At the same time, this genre, as a mechanism of intergenerational continuity and transmission, allows writers like dePaola to perceive and preserve iconic traces of their italianita, or Italianness. Both as character and as text, Strega Nona/Strega Nona has much to offer the field of Italian American studies as a clear exponent of what Fred Gardaphe calls the mythic or hybrid age of Italian American literature. The title character's twin attributes of strega and non(n)a grant the title character a unique alchemic power in dynamics of Italian American identity creation by tapping into both the comfortable distance afforded by the grandparent figure and the specificity of Strega Nona's Southern Italian folk magic. (1) Within this context, this article will explore three areas in which the series carries particular interest in the realm of Italian American identity: taxonomies of Italian American literature and ethnic hybridity, the iconic figure of the grandmother and its function in ethnic identity creation, and stregheria's emerging role as a touchstone of the uniqueness of italianita. Strega Nona as an Italian American Text Almost from its inception, Italian American studies has been uniquely preoccupied with its own development as a field and with the elaboration of an adequate critical apparatus. Starting with Rose Basile Green's The Italian American Novel (1979), (2) critics of Italian American letters principally have been concerned with matters of self-definition: what is Italian American Literature? Why has it taken so long for the field to emerge? How can we talk about the Italian American writer in ways that are both specific and inclusive, recognizing both what s/he has taken from the host culture and shares with the culture of origin? At the heart of this existential crisis--both for the field and for the individual writer--is the question of italianita, those characteristics of Italian culture that manifest themselves as artifacts of a text's hybridity. The object of prejudice and derision for the first generations of Italian Americans, and the source of ethnic pride for more recent ones, italianita is the basic element of Italian American cultural studies, around which most critical taxonomies have been arranged. For the earliest exponents of Italian American writing, their italianita was far more than a mere sign of cultural otherness. Insofar as a core value of this mostly Southern italianita was a profound distrust of anyone outside the restrictive family unit, the sharing of personal information in a public forum was frowned upon, even if it was in the service of the creation of a literary self. This interdiction on expressive communication was only compounded by the fact that the overwhelming majority of immigrants from Italy during the great wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relied on oral modes of communication in both the private and public spheres. …