Ethnic Discourse Research Articles

Self-Imposed Exile, Marginality, and Homosexuality in the Novels of Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O., and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri

ABSTRACT A burgeoning canon of Maghrebian writers in self-imposed exiled in France has in the last decade begun to openly broach the subject of homosexuality in Arab-Muslim communities of the Maghreb. Novels of writers like Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O. and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri reflect a fascinating trans-Mediterranean construction of homosexual identity. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s critical work, particularly her observation that nostalgia “charts an affective geography of the native land that often mirrors the melancholic landscapes” of the exiled, this paper analyzes the construction of homosexuality against the notions of exile, nostalgia, and marginality. The novels of these Maghrebian writers highlight nostalgia as both cathartic and paralyzing for “gay” migrant protagonists who find themselves trapped in the subtle seam between a cherished Maghreb that is framed as homophobic in the sexual clash of civilizations and a more liberal yet inauspicious France. The nostalgic contemplation of the constitution of a homosexual subjectivity is read as a critical performance and mainstreaming of hitherto marginalized voices that now subvert and fight back against normalizing discourses of ethnicity, sexual and gender identity as well as nationality.

“You look a little bit dark for my liking”: Māori and Pasifika women’s experiences of welfare receipt in Aotearoa New Zealand

INTRODUCTION: Based on empirical research with Māori and Pasifika lone mothers, this article considers the way that discourses of ethnicity and welfare combine to shape the lived experience of welfare receipt. METHOD: Drawing from 16 focus groups and interviews conducted in 2014 throughout Aotearoa New Zealand with women receiving Sole Parent Support, we analyse the way participants spoke of their experiences with Work and Income New Zealand.FINDINGS: Our findings indicate that the negative experiences related to the receipt of welfare in New Zealand are intensified for women who identify ethnically as Māori or Pasifika. Many of the women who took part in the research attributed poor treatment, including the denial of access to welfare entitlements, to their ethnicity. Participants spoke of avoiding visits to welfare offices because of the racism they anticipated experiencing in these spaces. CONCLUSIONS: There are significant implications for these findings. We argue that identifying as Māori or Pasifika can have consequences in relation to accessing welfare entitlements and that ethnicity may negatively influence interactions within welfare offices in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Review: Sarmatians – History and Archaeology of a Forgotten People, by Istvánovits, Eszter, and Valéria Kulcsár

Istvanovits, Eszter, and Valeria Kulcsar. Sarmatians – History and Archaeology of a Forgotten People . Mainz: Romisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, 2017. 501 pp, 329 ill. 978-3884672372. €90. “Ethnic discourse” has frequently constituted a divisive element in the study of Late Antiquity, surpassing even the debates surrounding the “fall of Rome.” This book proves that close attention to groups of ancient people can also do the opposite: Istvanovits and Kulcsar forge connections among diverse geographic and temporal fields of research through their search for the Sarmatians. The reader should note that the volume seeks actual Sarmatians insofar as archaeology can locate and describe them, not the Sarmatian as concept or literary phenomenon. Out of the many kinds of books about “barbarians,” the authors have crafted a kind of field guide to their subject as an elusive but important species, and the result is akin to a guided tour through an incredibly thorough and extensively illustrated museum of the Sarmatian. Istvanovits and Kulcsar begin with careful attention to the geography of the plains inhabited by the Sarmatians, stretching from Inner Asia at the junction of modern Russia, Mongolia, and China to the …

Only Greeks at the Olympics? Reconsidering the Rule against Non-Greeks at 'Panhellenic' Games


 
 
 
 This paper argues that the so-called “Panhellenic” games never knew a rule excluding non-Greeks from participation. The idea that such a rule existed has been accepted since the nineteenth century, when the idea of nationality played a much stronger role in the understanding of Greekness. Recent scholarship on Greek identity and ethnicity has shown that these were flexible and consta ntly renegotiated concepts and that the shared culture performed and the networks formed at sanctuaries and games played an important role in this negotiation process. Not only can the role of Olympia and other sanctuaries in the formation of Greek identit y now be understood without having recourse to a rule of exclusion, the flexible nature of identity also would have made it virtually impossible to the implement such a rule.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The paper starts by reconsidering the well - known episode about Alexander I at Olympia – the central source text for the supposed rule – and addresses some common assumptions about the role of the hellanodikai . It is argued that this source, while offering insights in to the ethnic discourse of the fifth century BC, does not actually pro ve the existence of a general rule against the participation of non-Greeks. Section two surveys the evidence for admission procedures at major agones , including the admission of boys and the exclusion of slaves. The registration of polis citizenship, often assumed to be connected to the requirement of being Greek, will be addressed in more detail in section three, which will argue that such a registration was an innovation of the Roman period, and did not aim at the limitation of admission for ideological r easons. Section four illustrates, by means of a passage from Polybius, how tensions about ethnicity could still be projected on the Olympics despite their inclusive nature.
 
 
 

Introduction: Contemporary African and Black Diasporic Spaces in Europe

Abstract This special issue explores spaces where identifications with the African diaspora become articulated, (re)negotiated and, as demonstrated by many articles in this issue, established as a field of the collective agency with transformative power in European societies. The African diaspora communities and cultures in Europe are constructed not only by individuals’ engagements in Africa and its global diaspora but also through the collective agency, aiming at promoting change in European societies shadowed by the normative whiteness, nationalist discourses and policies, human rights violations and overt racism. In this introduction, we discuss the empirical studies presented in this special issue as examples of academic, political and artistic spaces of African and black diasporic agency. Together, the articles make visible the diversity of African and black diasporic spaces in Europe. They also challenge methodological nationalism as well as essentialising discourses of race and ethnicity by acknowledging the global circulation of African and black diaspora cultures and the meanings of the transnational connections for diaspora communities.

Re-Reading <em>Birth of a Nation</em>: European Contexts and the War Film

This article examines the reception of Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith) from its 1915 release in various European countries. Considering France and Britain in particular, themes and debates emerge that shed light on the cultural significance this film would have had in Europe at the time. From this historical, archival research, we examine the cultural impact of Birth in these contexts to consider how discourses of race, ethnicity, region, and nationalism in the film were translated into these social, cultural, and political European national contexts, and in particular reflected contemporary concerns around structural divisions in society, the shaping of social hierarchies, and the search for a coherent national identity. Finally, the article examines how a historical study of the film's reception might point us toward certain current debates on filmmaking, which could be used as a lens to re-read the film and further understand contemporary audience responses.

Domesticity and Immigrant Women’s Labor in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic

Tracing the stories of Japanese picture brides, a generation of Japanese women who arrived in San Francisco in the early 1900’s for arranged marriages, and their American lives, Julie Otsuka’s novel The Buddha in the Attic (2011) combines a literary and historical focus. The experiences of dislocation, otherness, assimilation, and exclusion mark the protagonists’ lives, illustrating the dominant narratives of race, ethnicity, and gender. Otsuka articulates the problems oscillating between national consciousness and ethnic particularity, providing a critique of U.S. structures of domination and oppression that regulate the immigrant labor market. My paper offers a discussion about Japanese American women protagonists who must constantly reinvent themselves in the play of difference. The female lens, which the author employs, allows her to demonstrate how they are subjected to the forces guided by discourse of culture, ethnicity, and gender. The subaltern woman’s perspective on the domestic politics of U.S. is rendered through a collective narrator, and the absence of an identifiable individual voice stresses the characters’ fragmentation. America as home is transvalued, revealing itself as the site of unhomeliness, insecurity, and violence.

Book Review: Rwanda before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era

Book Review: Rwanda before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era

The Peoples of Pamir, Their Languages and the Census: The Ethnic Discourse

The Peoples of Pamir, Their Languages and the Census: The Ethnic Discourse

Different Gentes, Same Amazons

This article aims to examine the narrative of the Amazons as part of a political and ethnic discourse. It pays particular attention to the connection between the tale of the Amazons and the history of the origins of the Goths. The Historia Augusta and Jordanes’ Getica are among the most significant sources for shedding light on the versatility and the popularity of the saga of the Amazons. It also highlights the authors’ lexical strategy of identifying the ancient Amazons with one or more barbaric groups. This cultural operation allowed them to integrate the old story of women warriors into their historical narrative. In the last part of this article, the Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum is taken into consideration, stressing continuities and discontinuities in Adam of Bremen’s use of the tale of the Amazons.

‘Of course I ask the best students to demonstrate’: digital normalizing practices in physical education

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we focus on the use of digital video technology for instruction in physical education (PE). Physical educators can produce PE instruction videos (PIVs) as educational resources and often use them to enable independent learning situations. Little research has focused on the criteria teachers use to select students for demonstration in such video practices, while such selections may impact the constructions of (un) desirable bodies in PE. The purpose of this study therefore was to uncover discourses that guide teachers in their selection of students to demonstrate in instructional videos and to discuss the possible consequences these selections may have for the privileging and marginalizing of certain students. We recruited six physical educators who participated in a network of early adopters for ICT in PE and we used their own PIV's as instruments for individual stimulated recall interviews. We subsequently discussed issues raised in these interviews with four focus-groups. We analyzed the data inductively by using open, focused and selective coding, looking for themes in the explanations the teachers used about their selection of students. The results suggest that the selection of students to demonstrate was based on a degree of perceived competence to perform well in the video and a degree of perceived resilience to cope with public scrutiny of their bodies. The teachers constructed hierarchies of desirable bodies that were embedded in intersecting discourses of ability, gender and ethnicity. This resulted in the selection of students who primarily embodied practices associated with white, able-bodied masculinities while other bodies were made invisible. We reflect on how these discursive practices may privilege and marginalize certain students and the possible consequences of this and of the use of students in such videos in general.

Caradura: Migration, Informal Labor, and the Problem of Enacting Trust in a Spanish Enclave in Morocco

AbstractSome social scientists have argued that state legal institutions are not effective at protecting immigrants. Proper evaluation of ethnographic data, they argue, shows that migrants integrate themselves by forming strong, personal relationships of trust and friendship minimally grounded in discourses of ethnicity or kinship. They also transcend legal and cultural categories and assign roles other than those of the state. This article tests this model against the experience of migrants, refugees, and transfronterizos/as (cross‐border laborers) engaged in informal ties of confianza (trust) in Ceuta, a small Spanish enclave in Morocco. Workers claim that while ties of confianza can transform into kinship, they are also ridden with suspicion and vulnerable to exploitation. Therefore, migrants claim they must show a caradura (literally, a hard face) and be ready to stand up to their employers to protect their interests. Ceutan employers, by contrast, use confianza to manage the risks of dealing with hostile foreigners, to regulate state interference, and to integrate the migrant on their terms. Building on anthropological theories of informal and domestic work, this articles suggests that Ceutan confianza is better explained as an ambiguous, ethnically informed discourse both migrants and employers use to navigate Ceuta's unregulated shadow economy.

Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community

This article outlines how recent scholarly interventions about notions of race, ethnicity and nation in the ancient Mediterranean world have impacted the study of early Christianity. Contrary to the long-held proposition that Christianity was supra-ethnic, a slate of recent publications has demonstrated how early Christian authors thought in explicitly ethnic terms and developed their own ethnic discourse even as they positioned Christianity as a universal religion. Universalizing ambitions and ethnic reasoning were part and parcel of a larger sacred history of Christian triumphalism. Christian thinkers were keen to make claims about kinship, descent, blood, customs and habits to enumerate what it meant to be a Christian and belong to a Christian community. The narrative that Christians developed about themselves was very much an ethnic history, one in which human difference and diversity was made to conform to the theological and ideological interests of early Christian thinkers.

Mimesis, Contention, and Corporeality of Otherness: Reading the Haircuts of Undocumented Immigrants’ Daughters in Japan

Mimesis, Contention, and Corporeality of OthernessReading the Haircuts of Undocumented Immigrants’ Daughters in Japan Yurika Tamura (bio) In 2009 a daughter of Filipino undocumented immigrant parents in Saitama, Japan, drew national attention. In order to plead for annulment of her parents’ deportation, Noriko Calderon at the age of fifteen became a spokeswoman for the family. Once her parents’ verdict became final, Noriko cut her hair short and continued her plea in the media. In this paper I comparatively examine Noriko’s haircut and another immigrant’s daughter’s haircut in her appearance in a famous documentary and argue that the two girls’ haircuts, which are situated in the Japanese immigration discourse, are both political performance and feminine mimesis. Using Luce Irigaray’s notion of feminine mimesis, which posits mimesis as a profoundly ambivalent yet subtly contentious act, this essay traces how such haircuts can reveal masculine logic of exclusion. In the process, I focus on hair as both material and symbolic surface of the body, the location of subjectivity. locating hair as the corporeal surface Hair, made of once living and now dead cells, surfaces from inside and covers the body, and it can be understood as both inside and outside of the body.1 Rooted in the body, hair is considered to be an intrinsic part of body matter and bodily cycles. Yet hair can also be easily detached from the body. Can this liminal entity of our bodily surface act performatively? Can the hair of Othered bodies, senseless dead cells, give a sense of the corporeality of the Other?2 These questions surface at the two scenes in the media coverage of “undocumented” (a word which suggests both the existence and nonexistence of supposedly-not-existing bodies) immigrants and their phantoms in the [End Page 183] border control narratives in Japan. The phantoms are the cut hair of the two daughters of these immigrants: two women, two haircuts, one inside and the other out. These two cases of the public appearance of undocumented immigrants and their hair-cutting daughters occurred separately and are unrelated to each other. However, together they (and the daughters’ hair) locate the bodies outside the “belonging,” pointing to the very real and corporeal “cut” of bodies from a community of belonging. But there is more to these narratives: the daughters’ hair that is removed by the act of cutting exposes the stale logic of rootedness in a traditional discourse of nation and ethnicity. It subverts the notion of roots. The daughters’ haircut then becomes an act of performance that threatens the imperial politics of belonging within which citizenship is formed and dictated. Like strands of our hair sporadically appearing without a trace on our daily surfaces—sink, floor, and even on our shoulders—these phantoms of immigrants narratives, apparitions of excluded bodies, often haunt the imagined surface of a national community. Hair can also take on more meanings than bodily and social surface or roots. Starting with the story of Rapunzel and continuing to the contemporary hair-flipping performance of feminine sexiness in the US media, many cultures seem to confirm the idea that long feminine hair represents exuberant and enticing feminine sexuality. The analysis of female haircut performance that follows then extends to study the patriarchal nature of the national community that trims off and disciplines the raced and gendered bodies of the immigrants’ daughters (and their very corporeal body part) as well as finding the daughters’ act to constitute feminine performance, an intellectually calculated act (whether conscious or subconscious) that is highly sentient of the sexual politics of imperial heteropatriarchy. in lieu of words: noriko’s haircut Possibly one of the most hated figures in Japan in the year 2009, Noriko Calderon was only thirteen years old when she became a detested icon of the illegal alien. Her parents, Arlan and Sarah Calderon, had immigrated to Japan from the Philippines in 1997. Although undocumented, they were successful in building a life in Japan. Both parents worked in menial jobs and acquired good reputations for being diligent workers, and they eventually had a daughter, Noriko, who was growing up to be a regular Japanese teenager with a common Japanese female name...

Psicologia, psicanálise e relações étnicas no Brasil e na França

As relações entre Brasil e França quanto às dimensões de consideração sobre o racismo são semelhantes. No Brasil o mito da democracia racial impediu a percepção das injustiças e desigualdades pautadas na dimensão racializada. Na França o mesmo acontece com o mito da Republica – igualdade, liberdade e fraternidade. Porém estas insígnias são para os franceses não negros. A psicologia brasileira e a produção em saúde mental na França possuem suas diferenças. No Brasil o alheamento dos psicólogos na dimensão das relações étnicas é emblemático em pleno século 21. Na França, as discussões de Lacan sobre a psicanalise promoveram a expansão do campo psicológico a desbravar a dimensão étnica considerando Frantz Fanon e outros na compreensão do sofrimento psíquico e as relações étnicas na contemporaneidade. Neste mundo globalizado, com fluxos migratórios constantes, a discussão étnica é pauta primeira para a contemporaneidade. Lembrando que as populações negras, neste contexto, são as mais violentadas. Seja na Europa, nas Américas (Norte e Sul) e na África, as experiências da vivência da diáspora africana trazem experiências importantes para serem compartilhadas. Abordar parte destas imbricações e reflexões sobre os avanços e limites da psicologia no Brasil e na França no campo das relações étnicas e as relações com a atualidade nacional e global é o objetivo deste texto.

Race as an Open Field: Exploring Identity beyond Fixed Choices

This paper uses new, nationally representative data to examine how Americans describe their own racial and ethnic identities when they are not constrained by conventional fixed categories. Recent work on shifting racial classifications and the fluidity of racial identities in the United States has questioned the subjective and cultural adequacy of fixed categorization schemes. Are traditional racial boundaries breaking down? We explore the possibility in three ways. First, we explore the relationship between open-field identification (asked at time of survey) with fixed-choice racial and ethnic identifications (asked upon panel entry). Despite changes in American racial and ethnic discourse, most people reproduce normative, categorical racial and ethnic descriptors to identify themselves. Yet racial and ethnic classification is more complex and fluid for some respondents, particularly those who had earlier described themselves as Hispanic or mixed race. Second, we investigate the social meaning of alternative racial labels. Within the standard racial and ethnic categories, there are both dominant labels (e.g., White, Black, Hispanic) and less dominant alternatives (e.g., Caucasian, African American, Latinx); in some cases, the differences come with important social distinctions. Third, we explore the ways that a small but important subset of respondents refuse or deny racial identification altogether. We conclude with a discussion of the future of racial and ethnic classifications, paying particular attention to plans for the 2020 U.S. census.

‘I Myself am an Israelite’: Paul, Authenticity and Authority

This article argues that Paul prefers to present himself as an Israelite instead of a Judean for strategic purposes (Phil. 3.5; 2 Cor. 11.13; Rom. 9.4 and 11.1). I examine how Paul simultaneously makes use of claims to ethnic authenticity and his connection to the primordial past in authorizing his gospel message. The article draws on contemporary and ancient comparanda to demonstrate the appeal and function of discourses of ethnicity and antiquity in attracting and convincing Gentile followers. I use anthropological models of ‘instrumental authenticity’ and ‘situational ethnicity’ to examine Paul’s claims, and suggest that scholars’ traditional arguments of insider (Israelite) vs outsider (Judean) language do not go far enough; insider/outsider claims are more complex than scholars have allowed, and using the aforementioned anthropological models sheds light on Paul’s construction of his own authority.

РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ ЭТНИЧНОСТЕЙ В РУССКОЯЗЫЧНЫХ СОЦИАЛЬНЫХ МЕДИА

The paper presents the results of a study based on the Big Data paradigm analysis. The study aims at defining the features of the ethnic discourse in the Russian-speaking social media and the place of the North Caucasus ethnicities in this discourse. The informational basis for the study is 2,659,849 social media publications containing ethnonyms. The author concludes that the ethnic discourse is full of problematic topics mainly discussed by male participants. The study shows that the ethnonyms related to the North Caucasus peoples are often used in the context of crime and terrorism.

Unveiling the subject behind diversity: Exploring the micro-politics of representation in ethnic minority creatives’ identity work

Much literature on the cultural industries celebrates ethnicity as a source of creativity. Despite its positive connotation, this discourse reduces ethnic minority creatives to manifestations of a collective ethnic identity automatically leading to creativity, creating a paradox of creativity without a creative subject. Approaching creatives with an ethnic minority background as agents, this article investigates how they self-reflectively and purposely discursively construct ethnicity as a source of creativity in their identity work. Empirically, we analyze interviews with well-established creatives with an ethnic minority background active in Belgium. Most respondents construct their ethnic background as ‘hybrid’, ‘exotic’, or ‘liminal’ to craft an identity as creatives and claim creativity for their work. Only few refuse to discursively deploy ethnicity as a source of creativity, crafting more individualized identities as creatives. Our study contributes to the literature on power and ethnicity in the creative industries by documenting ethnic minority creatives’ discursive micro-struggle over what is creative work and who qualifies as a creative. Specifically, we show their counterpolitics of representation of ethnicity in the creative industries through the re-signification of the relation between the ‘west’ and the ‘other’ in less disadvantageous terms. Despite such re-signification, the continued relevance of the discourse of ethnicity as a key marker of difference suggests that ethnicity remains a principle of unequal organization of the creative industries.

National Identification Counteracts the Sedative Effect of Positive Intergroup Contact on Ethnic Activism.

Positive intergroup contact with socially and economically advantaged national majorities has been shown to reduce ethnic identification among minorities, thereby undermining ethnic minority activism. This finding implies that ethnic identity is the relevant social identity driving ethnic minorities’ struggle for equality. We argue that the study of the “sedating” effect of positive intergroup contact for minorities should be more nuanced. The existence of multiple and sometimes interplaying social identities can foster a reinterpretation of the meaning of “ethnic” activism. This study therefore examines how the interplay of ethnic and national identities shapes the sedating effect of contact on minority activism. We expect national identification to buffer the sedated activism resulting from reduced ethnic identification. That is, the mediation from intergroup contact to reduced ethnic activism through weakened ethnic identification is expected to be moderated by national identification. With survey data from Bulgaria, we investigated support for ethnic activism among Bulgarian Roma (N = 320) as a function of their contact with the national majority as well as their degree of ethnic and national identification. The predicted moderated mediation was revealed: a negative indirect relationship between contact and activism through decreased ethnic identification occurred among Roma with low national identification, whereas no sedating effect occurred among Roma identifying strongly as members of the Bulgarian nation. We discuss the meaning of national identification for the Roma minority, who experience harsh discrimination in countries where they have been historically settled, as well as convergence of these findings with work on dual identification. We highlight the role of interacting social identities in mobilizing resources for activism and the importance of adopting a critical view on ethnic discourse when studying activism in both traditional and immigrant minorities.