Cultural Contestation Research Articles

Postcolonial casualties: ‘Born-frees’ and decolonisation in South Africa

ABSTRACT In South Africa, ‘decolonisation’ has re-emerged as a theme for identity, economic and cultural contestations among the youth. In this, the celebratory rhetoric of rainbow nationalism of post-apartheid utopia is confronted head-on. From a theoretical discourse of the problematics of ‘the postcolonial’ this inquiry engages a critical question: if decolonisation is to undo colonial (and apartheid) economic, political and cultural legacies, to what extent has this been achieved for the South African youth? The struggle for political decolonisation (freedom) was such a long and painful journey that the wounded still bear the scars. But political freedom is an imagined trophy that newly independent states parade as decolonisation; cultural and economic colonisations are more indelible to unsettle. Drawing from public data, social statistical information, media narratives and academic literature, I argue that the post-apartheid youth, although ‘born-free’, remain victims of coloniality and the difficult process of decolonisation.

Wherefore ‘Authority’? International Law and the Contest of Legal Cultures

This is my commentary on Kostiantyn Gorobets' paper 'Peaks and Valleys: Contemplating Authority of International Law' in the same volume, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3744058. It focuses on the notion of 'authority' in the paper and queries whether the focus on this concept in Anglo-Scandinavian jurisprudential debates is warranted. In particular, I criticise the implicit idea that that tradition’s structure of analysing (international) law is now the 'standard account' against which all particular approaches need to be measured.

Translating the homoerotic from and into Russian

The translation of a text with homoerotic content reveals complex political, social and cultural contestation in the transnationalization of sexual desire and identity. This article examines the translations of homoerotic poetry by Russian émigré writer Valerii Pereleshin from and into Russian. Pereleshin’s different approaches in his inverse translation (Pushkin’s “Imitating the Arabic” and Kuzmin’s Alexandrian Songs) and direct translation (Pessoa’s “Antinous”) demonstrate how translation choices are governed by the interplay of discourses of same-sex desires in different cultural contexts, as well the poet-translator’s expression of sexual otherness.

Feeling of stigmatization and satisfaction with life among Arabic psoriatic patients

BackgroundSatisfaction and stigmatization are experienced differently in different cultural contests, especially, in patients with dermatological diseases affecting visible body parts. Reports in Arabic countries remain rare and very appealing in a multicultural population. AimsTo evaluate feeling of stigmatization and satisfaction with life in Arabic patients with psoriasis and identify predictors of feeling of stigmatization and satisfaction with life. MethodsIn a cross-sectional study design, Arabic patients with psoriasis completed the 6-item stigmatization scale and the satisfaction with life scale. Univariate and forward stepwise multivariate linear regression analyses were used to identify predictors of feeling of stigmatization and satisfaction with life. Covariates included patients' demographics (age, gender and education level), disease-related factors (disease severity, visibility, duration, and impact on quality of life) and patient-related factors (illness acceptance and dermatology self-care education level). ResultsIn total, 199 Arabic psoriatic patients were included in the study. Despite feeling highly stigmatized by their skin disease [mean (95% Confidence Intervals (CI)) of 7.0 (6.3–7.7)], psoriasis patients were generally positive about their overall satisfaction with life (mean (95% CI) of 21.0 (20.0–22.3). Impaired quality of life was the strongest predictor of both higher feeling of stigmatization (β-coefficient 0.39, 95% CI 0.30, 0.47) and less satisfaction with life (−0.36, 95% CI −0.53, −0.20). Higher levels of dermatology self-care education significantly predicted a lower feeling of stigmatization (−0.09, 95% CI −0.16, −0.01). Older patients (0.18, 95% CI 0.05, 0.30) and those with higher illness acceptance levels (0.14, 95% CI 0.03, 0.24) were more satisfied with life. ConclusionsA level of stigmatization was detected in most psoriatic patients including the satisfied ones. Patients with more impaired quality of life experienced higher level of stigmatization and less satisfaction with life. These findings further enforce the multidisciplinary approach in psoriatic patients and highlight the unmet need to include psychologist in the therapeutic algorithm.

Realm of Malay Civilization: Ethnoparenting, Habitus, and Cultural Contestation in Early Childhood Education of Sambas Malay Society

This article discusses how Sambas Malay parents carry out ethnoparenting and early childhood education to early childhood. Sambas Malay society are relatively traditional who still maintain the value system embraced by the local community. Ethnoparenting in this paper has the meaning of parenting performed by a particular ethnicity or tribe through the culture adopted. This research was conducted by the qualitative method through a sociological approach to education. The data was obtained through interviews and in-depth observations in Batu Makjage Village, Tebas District, Sambas Regency, West Kalimantan Province. Some habitus in ethnoparenting Sambas Malay society in educating early childhood include tunjuk ajar, pantang larang, kemponan and any tradition. Obstacles in ethnoparenting in the form of contestation of the value of Sambas Malay culture with modernity. The contestation that occurred experienced dislocation and resulted in the social change of Sambas Malay society and changed the habitus and urban lifestyle that has dominated in the ethnoparenting of Sambas Malay society.

Agama Hindu Bali Dalam Kontestasi Budaya

Traditions that have been going on for so long and acknowledged their sacredness,tradition provides a reference to life with repetitive rhythms, the majesty of harmony,thus abandoning conflict. Religion gives sacred values to the tradition so that it can gainreinforcement at the mental level into a socio-mythical space. Whereas modernity haveinjects for new ideas, which have an implication of the melting of the state barrier. Modernityunfolds human consciousness about time which is no longer repetitive but is linear,no longer sacred but secular where creative progress and alternatives are created. Traditionand Religion is a mythical-expressive culture that is challenged by progressive-creativeglobal culture coming through tourism. The politics of synergy has been carried outfor a positive vision for people’s lives. However, these three factors cannot be reconciledjust like that, cultural contestation becomes a necessity.

Traditions in (re)Negotiation: Geosocial Networking Apps and Intimate Relationships Among Men Seeking Men

Information and communication technologies have introduced profound changes to how individuals pursue sexual and romantic connections. One class of communication technologies that has become especially popular in recent times is that of geosocial networking apps, which characteristically use smartphones’ global positioning system technology to transmit and receive users’ location data. To date, however, most research investigating the impact of internet-mediated communication on socio-sexual relations has focused on more established systems like chat rooms, social networking sites, email, and instant messaging. The present study thematically analyzes interview data from gay, bisexual and queer men to explore how geosocial networking apps influence the development and organization of intimate relationships. Our findings reveal a simultaneous entrenching and subversion of traditional understandings of intimacy shaped by the heteronormative model of lifelong, monogamous marriage, which undercuts attempts by grand theory to paint contemporary intimate relationships in broad strokes as being either in a state of radical democratization or moral decline. Such cultural contestation, we argue, should be taken as a starting point in future research attempting to faithfully capture the complex and tentative transformations occurring with love and sex in the digital age.

Negotiating the Hyphens in a Culture of Surveillance: Embodied Surveillance and the Representation of Muslim Adolescence in Anglophone YA Fiction

In the era defined by the war on terror, border security, and increased Western cultural anxiety, the discourses of politics, race, and gender influence the representation of non-normative bodies, notably in the signification of female Muslim adolescent bodies as sites of political, racial, and cultural contestation within a culture of surveillance. Mirroring Western society, Anglophone YA fiction typically privileges white normative portrayals of Western adolescence. Fostered in a culture of suspicion, the revitalized orientalist tropes depict Muslim adolescent girls as bodies to “save,” “fear,” and “Westernize.” An emerging group of YA novels presents a substantive challenge to this tradition by seeking to disrupt patriarchal, white normative conceptualizations of Western adolescence. Through an analysis of Randa Abdel-Fattah’s When Michael Met Mina and S. K. Ali’s Saints and Misfits, this article explores the ways in which the female Muslim adolescent body is constructed as a product of surveillance, problematizing the experiences of embodied surveillance and the complexities of being identified as a part of racialized surveillant assemblages.

‘Families of mankind’: British liberty, League internationalism, and the traffic in women and children

ABSTRACT The League of Nations’ long term interest in the traffic in women and children mirrored, in key ways, what I call the ‘familial internationalism’ of some of its most influential British founders. Grounded in their understanding of the British Empire as an institution uniquely able to reconcile ‘liberty and self-government’ with the denial of liberty and self-government to the colonies, this vision of internationalism recast nations as cultural ‘families of mankind’ rather than political units with a right to sovereignty. This article thus explores first the influence of British imperial thought on League internationalism and then moves on to an analysis of the League’s Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children. In contrast to most historical investigations of the Committee, I read these archives as multivocal sites of political and cultural contestation about the status of women in relation to the national ‘family’. Ultimately, I argue, the work of the Committee resulted in an international convention that restricted women’s liberty by making it more difficult for them to travel internationally.

On Rhythms and Rhymes: Poetics of Identity in Postcolonial Italy

AbstractMusic, media and the arts in general have become a prime site of deep cultural contestation and polarization in Italy, generating unprecedented fractures in how Italian identity is conceived and lived. This article examines how the borders of Italian identity have been gradually stretched and challenged in the music of contemporary artists such as Mahmood, Ghali, and Amir Issaa. Through their beats, their lyrics, and, in the case of Issaa, his writing, these artists have given voice to a facet of Italianness that is rarely spotlighted in the media. In this sense, these cultural productions complicate the Italian collective memory by adding a layered understanding of contemporary identities, rooted in different cultures, speaking different languages, and embracing a way of being Italian that is looking to the future through the lens of the country’s colonial past.

Ledhug: Syncretic Music Culture in Magetan

In Magetan, East Java, Indonesia, the turn of the Javanese and Islamic years is marked by the celebration of Ledhug Sura. The celebration consisted of various events such as the Ledhug music festival, the people's market, the carnival, the night of repentance and the climax at the Andum Berkah Bolu Rahayu procession. This is a carnival for cakes and agricultural products which are considered to bring blessings to the community. This research focuses on the ledhug (lesung and bedhug, which means a combination of mortar and drum) music festival. Mortar and bedhug are the main focus of this article. The purpose of this study is to (1) reveal the form of the conception of ledhug music and (2) recognize the concepts contained in the ledhug music. Data mining methods include fieldwork using observation and interview techniques; literature review; and data presentation methods using descriptive-interpretative techniques. Based on the results of fieldwork and reading or interpretation of the ledhug music culture, it was concluded that the ledhug music performance was the result of a process of cultural syncretism. Ledhug music culture exists as a blend of musical elements from Javanese and Islamic music culture. Cultural syncretism in the context of ledhug is a deliberately produced discourse building, namely as a form of resolution of the reality of cultural contestation between the two ideologies that existed in Magetan.

Islām and Religious Plurality in South-East Asia. The Case of Muslim and Christian Dialogue in the Philippines

Following the historical accounts of Mindanao armed conflict and peace process in the Philippines, the author focuses on the reasons that brought about the difficult proceeding of Muslim and Christian relations towards a sustainable peace, which may respect, as much as possible, all the needs of both Muslim and Christian communities. The author considers the real cultural contest of the Philippines, which is made by three Peoples: Lumads, Muslims and Christians, and not only by two Peoples: Muslims and Christians. According to him, any peace process must focus on the complete anthropological and cultural context of the Country. A sustainable peace may be reached only through a harmonious approach, which interrelate whether political, social, as well as religious aspects, looking at the dignity of the human being. All these aspects are so fundamental, that cannot be forgotten in any educational program whether academic and political. Along this way, the author proposes and describes a possible model, which is focusing on Interreligious and intercultural dialogue between Lumads, Muslims and Christians, belonging to the Silsilah Dialogue Movement, located in Zamboanga City, (Mindanao Island). The author concludes his article underlining the discovery of a spiritual journey, which is the result of the personal spiritual dialogue as the pro-active attitude towards the acknowledgment of the truth about God, the self as well as the common good for all. Along this way, our own cultural and religious identity cannot be menaced by the diversity of different cultural and religious identities, since the pro-active attitude is able to prevent internal personal conflicts as well as the conflicts that different human groups may express within society. The religious experience of God is not a mere attribute beside our lives; it is the fundamental pillar on which to build reciprocal peace relations for the common good of all.

This is not a Pipe

Over the course of the Weimar Republic, cigarettes began to replaced pipes and cigars as the preferred method of tobacco consumption among urban-dwelling German men. Simultaneously, gender-specific advertising campaigns increasingly pitched cigarette smoking to German women. Through this visual advertising, the cigarette served as a site of mediated contention for the gendered meaning of a consumptive good. While tobacco ads helped to co-create the often-competing gendered conceptions of the cigarette, the ultimate goal of tobacco companies was to sell their products. Using ego documents, period literature, and advertisements in the Berlin press, this study argues that, in coordination with practical changes in consumer tastes, these ads helped to install cigarettes as a popular method of smoking for men in Weimar Berlin while simultaneously creating a media flashpoint for political and cultural contestations over gender.

Agonistic Entanglements of Art and Activism: #RhodesMustFall and Sethembile Msezane’s Chapangu Performances

ABSTRACTThis article reflects on some of the limitations and challenges of recent student protest movements in South Africa, with a specific focus on their activism on issues of cultural politics. It articulates the dominant modes of cultural activism of these movements, taking the #RhodesMustFall campaign as a defining instance in this regard. Revisiting one of the first victories of #RhodesMustFall, the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town’s main campus in 2015, it finds that another, very different and, in many ways, opposing form of cultural activism asserted itself in an artistic performance by Sethembile Msezane. It is argued that during this iconic scene of contemporary student protests, an uneasy tension thus came to exist, provoking fundamental questions regarding activist styles of cultural contestation and modes of subjectivity. Through Jacques Rancière’s notion of the politics of aesthetics, Msezane’s performance is taken to harbour a critique of the dominant activist modes of #RhodesMustFall, affirming the important role of creativity and imagination within radical political movements. Inversely, a critique of artistic interventions from the perspective of a #RhodesMustFall style of cultural activism is formulated, based on Fredric Jameson’s redemptive reading of philistine attitudes. Although #RhodesMustFall and Msezane’s performance are thus conceived in agonistic terms, it is argued that the tension between art and activism should be endorsed as a productive one, allowing for processes of self-critique, self-correction, and self-reinvention within social protest movements.

What Was Soviet and Ukrainian About Soviet Ukrainian Culture? Mykola Kulish’sMyna Mazailoon the Soviet Stage

AbstractIn the Soviet Union theatre was an arena for cultural transformation. This article focuses on theatre director Les Kurbas’ 1929 production of playwright Mykola Kulish’sMyna Mazailo, a dark comedy about Ukrainianization, to show the construction of “Soviet Ukrainian” culture. While the Ukrainian and the Soviet are often considered in opposition, this article takes the culture of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic seriously as a category. Well before Stalin’s infamous adage “national in form and socialist in content,” artists like Kulish and Kurbas were engaged in making art that was not “Ukrainian” in a generic Soviet mold, or “Soviet” art in a generic “Ukrainian” mold, but rather art of an entirely new category: Soviet Ukrainian. Far from a mere mouthpiece for state propaganda, early Soviet theatre offered a space for creating new values, social hierarchies, and worldviews. More broadly, this article argues that Soviet nationality policy was not only imposed from above, but also worked out on the stages of the republic by artists, officials, and audiences alike. Tracing productions ofMyna Mazailointo the post-Soviet period, moreover, reveals a lingering ambiguity over the content of culture in contemporary Ukraine. The state may no longer sponsor cultural construction, but theater remains a space of cultural contestation.

Spectacular suffering: Transgressive performance in penal activism

The spectacle of the body in pain has long functioned heuristically in crime and justice. Within this phenomenon sits a counter-cultural tradition of re-enacting outrages in public view to rally against injustices. This article starts from the established claim that bodily suffering comprises a core matter of humanitarian campaigning. However, if ‘spectacular suffering’ has predominantly been discussed as a visual experience, this article examines its performative aspects. Transgressive performance is evident in demonstrations of forced-feeding, hunger strikes, self-immolation and lip-sewing carried out by prisoners or by their intermediaries with a view to publicizing their cause. During such exhibitions, the body in pain becomes a heuristic device for converting suffering into a medium for public consumption. However, tropes of corporal suffering are susceptible to cultural contestation and resistance from spectators. These possibilities call the publicity of suffering into question as an inherently progressive strategy.

Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812 ed. by Nicole Eustace and Fredrika J. Teute

Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812 ed. by Nicole Eustace and Fredrika J. Teute

The Fabrication of Local Identity: Marginalization of the Indigenous Dayak Beverage in Central Kalimantan

Abstract 
 Since the decentralization era that started in 1999, the need to search for local identity in various regions in Indonesia gradually emerged. Local elites have been pursuing some specific characteristics to legitimize their indigeneity and authenticity which are useful to strengthen their local power grip. The production of local identity (e.g., adat; tradition) was transformed into a key factor for the success of a local government in the transition of political and economic power in Indonesia (Bourchier, 2007; Erb, 2007). In that cultural production, a particular ethnic tradition was often fabricated into a binary dichotomy; “good” and “bad” to come up with a “true local identity.” Within this scheme, a tradition considered “bad” is rejected. Baram, a traditional Dayak beverage containing alcohol, faces this kind of rejection. Even though it is inherently a part of the Dayak culture, evidence of its existence is systematically deleted in the public domain such as museums, books, and public documents and other local publications. Baram is perceived as a form of bad habit and also is thought to be irrelevant to the contemporary Dayak identity that is struggling to eliminate the stereotype of being uncivilized. This paper argues that the marginalization of baram not only is a matter of politics but also is related to current social and cultural contestation in Central Kalimantan, Palangkaraya in particular. The analysis in this paper focuses on the relation of the Dayak as indigenous people of Central Kalimantan and migrants from other Kalimantan regions and outside of Kalimantan. The data were collected during my short ethnographic research in Palangkaraya and Katingan Regency, Central Kalimantan in 2015. Baram is suspected of being a source of overconsumption of alcohol that triggers violence and criminal actions in both urban and rural communities. Such a formulation is common in the mass media to describe the negative effects of baram. The
 
 marginalization of baram continues and has escalated into a more serious matter as the local regime now labels it as illegal good. It is, thus, alienated in its own home.

Clarifying our cultural contest about chronic pain

Clarifying our cultural contest about chronic pain

From “Non-governmental Organizing” to “Outer-system”—Feminism and Feminist Resistance in Post-2000 China

ABSTRACTIn post-2000 China, both the frontiers and the landscape of feminism and feminist resistance have changed, and this change embodies a move away from the “non-governmental organizing” path that characterized the development of feminism during the 1980s and 1990s. This article addresses this “paradigm shift” in Chinese feminism by examining the “outer-system” political stand of post-2000 feminism and their domains of action through performance art, philanthropic volunteerism, and cyberfeminist articulations. These novel modes of feminist protest in the absence of a formal organizational structure challenge our understanding of feminism as a process of “non-governmental organizing” in public space and warrant a cultural analysis to shed light on how feminism engages in cultural contestation and subversion, often in semiprivate and semipublic spaces, in order to develop new and alternative cultural patterns and interpretive frames.Abbreviations CPPCC The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference WF The All-China Women’s Federation