Hegemonic Ideology Research Articles

Twilight of the Proletariat: Reading Critical Balkanology as Liberal Ideology

Critical Balkanology is a sub-discipline of Central and East European Studies that deconstructs and renders arbitrary the claims of ethnic nationalisms and Western “colonial” representations of the Balkans. Yet, this critical and nominally anti-racist project is parasitic on a hegemonic Euro-Atlantic liberal ideology in that it cannot see beyond the singular individual as victim and vanguard, thereby obscuring and/or effacing an awareness of class inequality. Tomislav Longinović's Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (2011) is emblematic of this project. I place this text under an immanent critique and a contrapuntal reading as an example of how one can rescue class consciousness from this literature and push the limits of its politics while, in Longinović's case, reading it against the socioeconomic contradictions of post-MiloŠević Serbia. Longinović's tracing of the vampire metaphor as a way of understanding the consumptive nature of both ethnic nationalism and Western imperialism reveals a politics that stigmatizes Serbia's plebeian history in favour of a Westernized and urban middle class youth cult of techno-culture, rock music, and the disembodied voices of (male) intellectuals – a form of epistemic violence that parallels processes of privatization, social cleansing, and class oppression consuming the bodies of (sub)proletarians.

Mapping Monolingualism within a Language/Race Cartography: Reflections and Lessons Learned from ‘World Languages and Cultures Day’

An interactive exhibit at a university’s ‘World Language Day’ challenges systems of privilege that organize the study of ‘foreign’ and ‘world’ languages. Through discursive framing, participants’ written responses reveal an alignment with hegemonic ideologies of race and nation that elevate English monolingualism as a proxy for a White, virtuous cultural order within which ‘World language’ education safely—and additively—finds its place.

Black female college athletes’ perception of power in sport and society

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to examine Black female college athletes’ perception of power within the context of a “safe cultural space”. Scholars note the ability to discern the notion of power and its dynamics is a key factor towards empowerment. For marginalized populations, addressing topics such as power is best within a safe cultural space, or an environment that is free from surveillance and allows students to freely express themselves (Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.). Employing Black feminist thought, eleven (N = 11) Black female collegiate athletes that participated in a culturally relevant program within a historically White institution of higher education were examined utilizing qualitative methods. Findings revealed the women's understanding of power was as a possessive attribute; and, the words and symbols they attributed to power reflected hegemonic examples of power. Hegemonic ideologies pervade college athletics, thus, the creation of “safe cultural spaces” allowed the Black female college athletes to acknowledge their marginalization amongst peers and discern how power dynamics affects their development in sport and society.

Beyong Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel by Héctor Hoyos

Reviewed by: Beyong Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel by Héctor Hoyos Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón Hoyos, Héctor. Beyong Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. 296 pp. To read Bolaño is, unavoidably, to read beyond Bolaño and Héctor Hoyos knows this very well. Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel moves through Bolaño so as to go beyond him, to “narratives of the global” embodied in the post-1989 “global Latin American novel,” which conceptualizes and problematizes “globality” from a multiplicity of perspectives. For Hoyos, Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is not only the internationally best known instance of this novelistic form, but also the ideal point of departure for a greater investigation into what has become a widespread formal disposition of contemporary Latin American literature. Hoyos’s objects of study—penned by a diverse cast of characters that spans from Bolaño to Diamela Eltit, Alberto Fuguet, Mario Bellatin, Fernando Vallejo, César Aira and Chico Buarque—are works that, like Chilean author’s previously mentioned novel, not only represent, but also and more importantly consolidate both the world and Latin America as their horizon and chamber of resonance. For the author, these novels offer a critique of hegemonic ideologies of globalization and, in the best of cases, a paradoxical articulation of the global as a whole that destabilizes and reveals world consciousness. A critical interrogation of the field of “world literature” from the perspective of Latinamericanism frames Hoyos’s study. He understands world literature as a critical movement that attempts to consolidate a transnational canon in the contemporary age of globalization. In this sense, it is an “ism” (“worldliteraturism,” Hoyos calls it), which imagines itself as an organizing principle for literature and literary criticism and seeks to rise above linguistic, national, regional, and genealogical categories. But Hoyos is not interested in simply claiming a world-literary status for Latin American literatures. His engagement with the field of world literature stems from literary works which inscribe themselves in the global and offer “literary representations of the world” that question and problematize the rules which organize the category and its drive towards transnational literary consolidation. These works, he believes, think the experience of globalization and situate themselves beyond the boundaries of national literatures through counterfactual exercises that denaturalize the global and articulate it under the sign of negativity. Moreover, they theorize the global, the “world,” and the status of literature in the world. In order to make a space for these works in the field of world literature, Hoyos proposes a methodology characterized by what he calls “critical hospitality.” This approach proceeds by making the emergent academic fields of “wordliteraturism” and that of Latinamericanism bear upon each other in a contrapuntal fashion. The resulting Latin American-inflected vision of world literature can draw and benefit from what Hoyos sees as Latinamericanism’s long tradition of a praxis of multiple positionalities. A praxis capable of “generating discourse about a complex region, rich in particularities, while also accounting for the commonalities”—a project which mirrors that of world literature and which would not reproduce globalization’s drive to cultural homogenization (10). Hoyos’s Latin Americanist [End Page 204] approach is, of course, explicitly partial, but so are the approaches to world literature that present themselves as disembodied and ecumenical. Through his gesture, Hoyos seeks to counteract the political apathy that he believes characterizes certain hegemonic trends of world literature, politicizing the paradigm and bringing it closer to the texts themselves. That said, Hoyos’s Beyond Bolaño does not entail the performance of its proposal for a Latin Americanist “world-literaturist” criticism per se. Instead, its body chapters are firmly grounded in a regional taxonomy of the global Latin American novel, and proceed by breaking down the genre into five key, but not exhaustive, continental “developments”: the Nazi novel, the novel of South-South escapism, the novel about the supermarket, the novel about the narco, and the “art statement” novel. By studying these formal variations, Hoyos shows how their different authors negotiate, capture, reproduce, counter, affect, or are affected by the ideologies of globalization. More specifically...

Self as Nation: Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography by Tamar S. Hess

Reviewed by: Self as Nation: Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography by Tamar S. Hess Michael Keren (bio) Tamar S. Hess. Self as Nation: Contemporary Hebrew Autobiography. Brandeis UP, 2016, 213 pp. ISBN 978-1611688801, $40.00. To those of us interested in the lives of others, Hebrew autobiographies, whether written before or after the establishment of the State of Israel, have often been disappointing because so many of these texts have been rooted, as Tamar Hess rightly notes, in collective national life. In her introduction to Self as Nation, Hess shows how Hebrew autobiography since the mid-nineteenth century has followed the path familiar to other national literatures in which the individual self has been subjected to the national narrative. The autobiographer may celebrate the Jews' settlement in a new home or express disillusionment with the Zionist project, but that project overwhelms all dimensions of life, especially in men's life writing. Autobiographies written by women are often more concerned with personal agonies, such as the betrayal of women pioneers by fellow men settlers, but the focal point remains on the collective effort. Hess analyzes a handful of autobiographical works by Israeli writers of different backgrounds and life experiences. These include Yoram Kaniuk and Netiva Ben-Yehuda, whose post-traumatic accounts of their experiences in the war of 1948 are soaked in blood and tears; Nathan Zach and Haim Be'er, whose autobiographical selves are formed in relation to dying mothers; and [End Page 510] the Baghdad-born Shimon Balas and the Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld, whose life stories represent two aspects of the immigrant experience in Israel. Since autobiography allows silenced voices to confront hegemonic ideologies and marginal groups to renegotiate their relationship with the social center, it is not surprising that all the writers analyzed here have taken critical moral stands that challenge the Israeli collective. According to the author, however, they have also continued to assert a commitment to that collective. For example, Kaniuk's narration of the 1948 war reflects both a personal and collective trauma, and in her discussion of autobiographies by Esther Raab and other women Hess states that these writings offer a point of departure for critical meetings of individual identities with the national collective. Self as Nation thus reaffirms a common conception about Israeli identity according to which the self and the nation cannot be separated even in an era in which literature focuses on the individual and society is split. As Hess puts it, "At a period marked by the splintering of Israeli society by ethnicity, class, gender, and religion, Israeli autobiography has become increasingly drawn to collective symbols and cultural tropes" (164). This statement is supported, for example, by an autobiographical sketch written by literary scholar Ariel Hirchfeld, whose older brother was killed in the 1948 war. Hirschfeld tells of his brother's portrait that hung above his cradle, which understandably played a role in his identity formation. Hess, however, does not allow this episode to remain within the private sphere of a family who had suffered a terrible loss. To her, "the national circumstances that underpin his older brother's death prevent it from being exclusively private, thus framing the memoir in relation to both spheres—the public and the private, the individual and the national—inseparably and at once" (154). Here lies what I consider the book's main shortcoming: the assumption that the individual voice of Israeli writers "clearly represents the national, just as the national is the plain on which individual Israeli identities are inscribed, and can formulate themselves" (155). This assumption is not necessarily confirmed by the autobiographies discussed here but seems to stem from the fact that the author is admittedly less concerned with the persons who wrote them than with the ways in which their self-representations construct their identities. Thus, when novelist Haim Be'er, who grew up in a Jewish orthodox home in Jerusalem, tells of the alienation his parents felt toward officials of the Ministry of Rationing and Supply who enforced the government's austerity policy in the 1950s, it makes sense that Hess ties that alienation to Jewish people's traditional fear of ruthless institutions that had endangered them in the...

Modelling free social spaces and the diffusion of social mobilization

Free social spaces have long been emphasized in the social movement literature. Under names such as safe spaces, social havens, and counterpublics, they have been characterized as protective shelters against prevailing hegemonic ideologies and as hubs for the diffusion of ideas and ideologies. However, the vast literature on these spaces has predominantly focused on internal dynamics and processes, thus neglecting how they relate to the diffusion of collective mobilization. Inspired by formal modeling in collective action research, we develop a network model to investigate how the structural properties of free social spaces impact the diffusion of collective mobilization. Our results show that the assumption of clustering is enough for structural effects to emerge, and that clustering furthermore interacts synergistically with political deviance. This indicates that it is not only internal dynamics that play a role in the relevance of free social spaces for collective action. Our approach also illustrates how formal modeling can deepen our understanding of diffusion processes in collective mobilizations through analysis of emergent structural effects.

Revisionary Historical Metatext or 'Good Mills and Boon'?: Gender, Genre, and Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl

In recent decades, literary critics have become increasingly interested in the ways that contemporary historical novels are used to write “history from below.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1978), Adrienne Rich describes a process she calls “re-visioning,” a process that is defined as “looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (35). Many female authors of contemporary historical novels engage in exactly this process, looking back in time and reinserting the histories of women into the dominant narrative of history in which they are often excluded or marginalized. Novelists like Philippa Gregory, Diana Gabaldon, and Tracy Chevalier have made feminist politics clearly visible in their bestselling historical novels. And yet, for all their potential and visible disruptions of patriarchal ideology, many of these popular novels also make use of literary archetypes, tropes, and narrative patterns that reinstate hegemonic ideologies about individual identity and social structure. Using Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) as a case study, this paper argues that popular women’s historical novels often exist in tension between the pulls of revisionary feminist historiography and the popular romance narrative.

An Eternal Parting: Staging Internal Diaspora, Performing South Korean Nationalism

The myth of Korean-ness is reconstructed via the figures of minorities in a documentary/performance, An Eternal Parting, performed by the South Korean performance group Movement Dang-Dang in 2011 and 2013. It showcases the phenomena of Korean diaspora, starting with the deportations of Korean exiles from Siberia under Stalin during the 1930s, and hinges on the presence of the descendants of exiled Korean ethnic populations in contemporary South Korea, including how they are both accepted and excluded by their countrymen. However, although An Eternal Parting tries to redefine the myth of Korean-ness from a marginal viewpoint, its fundamental ambivalence does not escape hegemonic Korean ideologies of nationalism, bloodline, family and home.

Founding the father: Constructing a paternal identity in Aleksandr Pushkin’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great and Alexandre Dumas’s Blanche de Beaulieu

This article investigates how Aleksandr Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas – writers of partial African descent – reconstruct their forefathers’ identities, and to some extent their own, through fictional narratives, thereby restoring ‘whitewashed’ black legacy to its rightful place. The focus on the forefather in Pushkin’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (begun around 1827) and Dumas’s Blanche de Beaulieu (1826) reflects a watershed moment in the writers’ personal and professional lives, in which they were preoccupied with their public image, their creative legitimacy and their legacy. By simultaneously evoking, yet concealing, the writers’ ancestry, these fictions permit a surreptitious exploration of its distressing aspects. Although the narrative construction of the ancestors’ identity operates within the constraints of the hierarchical representational binaries described by Said in Orientalism, the texts ultimately destabilize these binaries, exemplifying literature’s unique ability to subvert hegemonic ideology.

Representations of disability in Turkish television health shows: Neo-liberal articulations of family, religion and the medical approach

Abstract This article investigates representations of disability in Turkish television shows on health in their relation to the hegemonic ideologies that shape and are reproduced by them. Three categories emerge: disability as a familial, religious and medical issue. Respectively, each category is moulded by and perpetuates a patriarchal motherhood discourse, an Islamic ethos, and a medical approach. These interrelate with the overarching disabling and neo-liberal ideologies and produce contradictory representations – e.g. disability is represented as curable, but also left to God’s will. This relates to the particularities of Turkey, defined by Islamic leanings towards disability, accompanied by neo-liberalism and cultural conservatism.

Enjoying Women: Sex, Psychoanalysis, and the Political

The enjoyment of women, both in the sense of object and subject, is a powerful political and cultural construct. My doctoral dissertation, submitted to Oxford University in 2003, explores the fantasy of women's sexual enjoyment in philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and popular culture. If offers a sustained critical engagement with the work of thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, Otto Weininger, and Jacques Lacan, as well as the art and literature of Michel Houellebecq, Michael Haneke, and David Lynch. It investigates how the fantasy of feminine enjoyment manifests itself in Western intellectual and popular culture, and analyzes the ethical and political consequences this fantasy has on the real-life perception of and response to sexual violence. While not attempting to assess or present the “truth” of female enjoyment, this work exposes how the “enjoying woman” fantasy is itself an ideological fantasy that structures the hegemonic field of Western liberalism, bringing it perilously close to its self-avowed opposite, Islamic fundamentalism. Žižek's Marxist-Lacanian syncretism is valuable to feminist theory and to ethical theory more broadly because it politicizes the violent enjoyment of racism and other prejudices; however, Žižek’s theory disappointingly fails to assist in the politicization of sexual violence because of its reliance on the Lacanian fantasy of the enjoying woman. The field of Western liberal hegemonic ideology is not characterized only or primarily by capitalism but also by the depoliticization of sexual violence. The fantasy of the enjoying woman attempts to place “jouissance feminine” beyond or outside this field, and in so doing guarantees the perpetuation of that field. This work is an attempt to expose the violence and resignation that structures the fantasy of feminine enjoyment, and an attempt to re-politicize sexual violence by breaking with the theoretical and cultural coordinates of its ideological field.

Queering Hip-Hop, Queering the City: Dope Saint Jude’s Transformative Politics

Queering Hip-Hop, Queering the City: Dope Saint Jude’s Transformative Politics

The cultural politics of language in Sudan: against the racialising logic of language rights

ABSTRACTThe sociolinguistic repertoires of individuals in Sudan are products of institutionalised orders of normalisation. The visibility of language in popular and official discourses in Sudan is always linked with wider cultural and political projects. This paper intends to engage with and explicate this observation by, first, examining how the dominant ideology of language operates in practice in Sudan, and second, by inspecting how it is contextually negotiated, appropriated, and resisted by social individuals. Our guiding questions are: (1) How is the hegemonic ideology of language in Sudan enacted, appropriated and resisted in concrete verbal interaction and other metalinguistic activities? (2) How can social groups and individuals exploit the dynamic nature of language not just to defend the right to develop their languages beyond the polarising terms (e.g. Arabic vs. African) constructed by interest-oriented ideologies, but most importantly to do politics through the dominant regime of language? We argue for a recognition of ‘difference’ within a historically established frame of diversity rather than a culturalist model of naturally fixed homogeneities This paper is an exercise in semiotic ideological analysis within the framework of cultural politics which views language as a proxy for doing politics by culture.

Narrative Protocols, Dialogic Imagination and Identity Contestation: A Critique of a Prescribed English Literature Curriculum

A critique of the prescribed Anglo-American canon for Jordanian Universities, this article utilises narrative protocols and storytelling juxtaposed against my own literary education and a former student of mine. It examines how lived experiences, identity contestations and reconciliations are reflected and reinforced in a dialogic exchange with the study of English literature at undergraduate, graduate levels as well as while teaching. In the ‘New Times’ of cyberspaces and the Internet accretion, the data used in this study is gathered through email and Facebook message exchange between a former student of mine and myself. After first introducing the English literary curriculum used in Jordanian universities, this article offers a critique of the canon pointing out that the study of English literature. As traditionally conceived in these universities, this tradition reinforces Eurocentrism, monolithic, elitism and particularly, and for the purpose of this article, in the ways it is disseminated, it signifies relations of power in the academy. It further shows how the subject-positions of students of English in this context are contested between repulsion, conformity, and when textual cultural representations are at stake, they pass through a process of an ‘imbibing’ construction of identity that reconciles warring sentiments of love and agony. The paper concludes by reminding literature educators that some students bring profound experiences of anguish and identity contestation with them to the literature classroom, and that it is therefore our responsibility to challenge the hegemonic and essentialised ideologies and practices informed by the adoption, perpetuation and dissemination of the literary canon in these educational contexts.

The End of Detropia: Fordist Nostalgia and the Ambivalence of Poetic Ruins in Visions of Detroit

Nostalgia never seems far from the surface in these assessments. A way to perceive the past, nostalgia is characterized by a desire, often bittersweet or melancholy, to return to a bygone era. [...] A nostalgic view creates a kind of imagined, Utopian past that stands in stark contrast to the present day, which has been judged deficient in some important way. Why else would one want to revive what has been lost? (Andrew Parnaby, Life Among the Ruins 286-287)Discussions of Detroit in popular culture often touch upon the delicate subject of nostalgia-not always rooted in, but often perpetuating, an (unspoken) desire to imagine life in the Motor City before suburban white flight and the consolidation of African-American political power in the city. More cautiously, however, one could also argue that such nostalgia is more intentionally situated within a postracial framework that seeks to remove the question of race altogether-either in active denial of the ugly histories haunting the subject, or in a sincere, if misguided, attempt to perpetuate the utopie kind of color-blind rhetoric that appeals to humanity's highest ideals. And there is still another nostalgia here-longing for the age of Fordist-based manufacturing economies, and the birth of a sustainable middle class and leisure culture, which was anchored by a strong labor movement and maintained a manageable balance with the market-driven pressures and efficiency-minded management of capitalist industries. George Steinmetz writes that Walter Reut her's 1950 ?Treaty of Detroit' with General Motors (GM) was a model of the neo-corporatist labor-management agreements that proliferated in the United States and Western Europe during the Fordist era. GM was protected from strikes while the United Auto Workers (UAW) gained health, unemployment and pension benefits, [and] expanded vacation time (220). Nostalgia for this is perhaps enabled (albeit unintentionally) by Chrysler's 2011 Super Bowl Ad, Imported from Detroit, which reimagined the Motor City not as a hotbed of racial tension, capitalist exploitation, and increasing urban decay, but as a testament to the importance of the American worker. Beneath the surface, however, such a workforce is essentially redundant, if not completely obsolete, in the current age of late capitalist, information-based global economies.Of course, the fact that it was a car commercial (broadcast during modern consumer culture's most grotesque night) is not a lost irony-the auto industry's larger indifference to the value of US labor was one central factor in Detroit's present economic state in the first place. Just as importantly, meanwhile, lingering racial tensions in the city for decades played as major a part in decimating the city as the collapsed manufacturing base had. Most distressingly, the two are deeply interrelated-playing on racial divides slowly, but steadily, pitted middle and working class workers against each other, essentially killing off the modern labor movement. And the rise of a consumeost-driven individualism, which commercials pander to on a persistent basis, further undermined any sense of a collective struggle for better futures. Certainly, none of these issues would make it into a car commercial whose first goal, whatever its stated intentions, would be to sell a product far more than to rebuild a city, let alone reconstruct an imagined way of life.After all, nostalgia is just that-a mythic depiction of the past that leaves out far more than it includes, and filters history through the kind of rose-colored glasses which serve the interests of present hegemonic ideologies. We should not expect a Chrysler commercial, of all texts, to be markedly different. And yet the ideal embedded in there-of the mythical American workforce and the middle class culture built by it-is not necessarily a bad one. Likewise, nostalgia is not only reactionary or conservative (although it mostly is)-and the particular kind of Fordist nostalgia glimpsed by gloriously idealized visions of Detroit's manufacturing past, selective although they are, can be as much a mobilizing hope for the future as a melancholic look back-particularly as urgent issues of economic instability and income inequality come increasingly to the forefront of popular consciousness. …

Life Writing in the Colonial Archives: The Case of Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996) of Nigeria

ABSTRACTCommentators on Europe’s colonial archives often highlight the lack of coherence to be found in official and national repositories. Even within a single file, the archives do not simply, or only, yield evidence about imperial intentions and colonial subjects in Europe’s diverse territories. Focusing on secret files compiled in the 1930s and 1940s around the activities of the prominent Nigerian newspaper editor and later first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996), this article argues that Colonial Office archives reveal the tensions between imperialism as a hegemonic ideology and the diverse practices of individuals, including colonial governors, civil servants in London, and their critics in the colonial public sphere. The article shows how Azikiwe’s biography was produced by spies and informants in Nigeria, and by civil servants at the Colonial Office, but that Azikiwe himself cleverly exploited the meticulous record-keeping procedures in Whitehall to insert his political autobiography into the files for posterity.

I want my Snooki: MTV’s failed subjects and post-feminist ambivalence in and around the Jersey Shore

As a sexually promiscuous and outrageously flamboyant young woman, Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi of MTV’s Jersey Shore (2009–2012) could be said to be the ultimate example of Angela McRobbie’s post-feminist subject. However, as pervasive as post-feminist narratives have become in popular culture, the figure of Snooki problematizes its ideal forms of femininity and meritocratic success. In this paper I argue that Snooki’s potential challenges to post-feminist ideology were contained by news reporting on her at the height of her fame. This analysis posits a noteworthy divide in that those most inclined to watch/consume Snooki-as-text (the MTV audience) likely remained beyond the reach of the news media’s attempt to re-inscribe hegemonic ideologies onto her star image/text. I examine the relation between Snooki-as-text (the Snooki presented on Jersey Shore) and the extra-textual attempts to undermine her popularity and legitimacy. I frame this discussion along three axes of transgression and containment: the sexual empowerment/threat paradigm; the physical markings of class and ethnic subjectivity; and the textual boundaries of meritocratic success. Despite efforts to contain her, Snooki’s short-lived success hints at an ambivalence toward post-feminism today that could help chart a revitalized form of feminist politics within youth-driven popular culture.

Chased by the Double Bind: Intersectionality and the Disciplining of Lolo Jones

ABSTRACTJeré Longman’s controversial 2012 New York Times article criticizing track star and U.S. Olympian Lolo Jones, which reached more than 30 million readers, contributes to the hegemonic ideologies that deride female athletes through double binds. Yet due to Jones’s gender, race, class, and sexuality, traditional double binds do not offer an adequate framework. Employing an intersectional approach that counters a tendency to highlight the experiences of privileged White women, I articulate the binds of feminine/athlete, poor/hustler, and virginal/exotic to complicate feminist communication scholars’ notion of the double bind and address interlocking, inseparable oppressions. Highlighting the significance of nuanced double binds that bridge feminist criticism and critical sport study, I consider the potential for feminist analysis to respond to the bias and backlash experienced by celebrity sportswomen.

Heritage Language Education Without Inheriting Hegemonic Ideologies: Shifting Perspectives on “Korea” in a Weekend Japanese-Language School in the United States

ABSTRACTLearning a heritage language can be celebrated to enhance marginalized groups’ self-esteem, but a heritage can also encompass ideologies prevalent in the groups’ original homeland. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2007–2011) at a weekend Japanese-language school in the United States, this article investigates how ideologies on race politics within a heritage language community’s homeland are reproduced or subverted through heritage language education. We analyze treatment of Korea–Japan power relations at school by focusing on the practice of guiding students (not) to shift their perspectives in three cases involving (a) discrimination against Resident Koreans in Japan, (b) gender-specific abortion in South Korea, and (c) South Korea and Japan’s dispute over possession of Tokdo/Takeshima. While social analyses of heritage language education tend to focus on a minority group’s place in mainstream society, this article suggests investigating the reproduction of ideologies from its homeland via heritage language education.

Beauty as violence: ‘beautiful’ hair and the cultural violence of identity erasure

ABSTRACTCurious observations of hair and hairstyles worn by many women of Black African descent reveal the triumph of a Eurocentric dominant ideology of beauty. I assert in this study that the process of attaining the hegemonic ideology of ‘beautiful’ hair, often defined as a European and Asian texture and style of hair, is a violent journey. This study draws largely from Johan Galtung's seminal theoretical works on violence, particularly his articulation of cultural violence as a creation of ideology through psychological process of indoctrination and brainwashing, and the internalization of this process. From this theoretical framing, and a demythologization of the multiplicity and flexibility narrative of postmodern self and identity, this study examines the attitudes of young Black South African women toward their natural hair and their perception of ‘beautiful’ hair. Through a survey of 159 Black female students in a rural South African university with a predominantly Black student population, and face-to-face conversations with five female students, the study asserts that many Black African women's relationship with their hair is shaped by violence. The physical and cultural violence perpetuated in the quest for ‘beautiful’ hair is consequently creating a generational cycle of identity erasure.