Multifaceted Identity Research Articles

Third-generation British-Bangladeshis from east London: complex identities and a culturally responsive pedagogy

This article examines the lives and multifaceted identities of a group of young Bangladeshis from east London. Qualitative research – involving predominantly group and in-depth one-to-one interviews – was undertaken with 16 young Bangladeshis aged 15–19. Two key findings emerge from this research. Firstly, the knotty and fluid concept of identity is important to these young people as their narratives demonstrate that they are negotiating meanings of what it means to be a British-born Bangladeshi Muslim. Secondly, through a detailed examination of two aspects of their multifaceted identity – the mother tongue and the hijab – this article argues that their identity problematic poses important questions for educational spaces. One of the key conclusions of this article is that by embracing a culturally responsive model of education and exploring – however difficult and ethically challenging it may be – our pupils’ cultural, linguistic, ethnic and religious identities within the curriculum can be meaningful and ultimately educational.

Examining Narratives of Conflict and Agency : Insights into Non-Local English Teacher Identity

This study examines teacher identity through conflicts and agency emergent from the narratives of five non-local English teachers working in Bangkok, Thailand. The examination of conflict and agency to gauge one’s identity is suitable as these constructs are interdependent. Using a sociocultural approach, the study examined meaning and word choices found in the participants’ narratives. The findings indicated that participants encountered conflicts with different social entities such as their employers’ expectations, circumstances of their students, and interference from other stakeholders. The ways in which these conflicts were addressed depended on the workplaces of the participants, wherein those whose workplace had stronger social suggestion resorted to a resolved acceptance of difference, while participants whose workplace had weaker social suggestion enacted agency by modifying pedagogy or teaching content, or opposing the school administration. It was found that these agentic actions were carried out based on the notion of inclusivity and social justice. From these findings, the multifaceted identity of non-local English teachers was not only determined by their culture or country of origin but also by their work context. This study calls for further examination of international school settings, as well as the professional growth of non-local English teachers in such contexts.

English

Benedict Anderson claims In Imagined Communities that nationalism and national identity are but fruits of a politicised imagination, and that the nation only acts what the State imagines. A decade later, in Tom Inglis re-examines such an imagination in a postcolonial Irish context, and traces the significance of the land in the process of identity formation. Anderson’s and Inglis’s understanding of personal identity formation resonate with the Deleuzian reading of a Rhizome-based local identity set against a monolithic backdrop of root-tree system. Where the former variety promises an animate, multifaceted identity, the latter conditions the development of Irishness to a closed system in which values are yet to be pronounced by the governing root, namely, the State. This is where one can draw the very red thin line between personal and national perception of reality (of being). The multilayered and dialectical nature of the modern Irish novel and its critical caliber has created an accurate touchstone that enables the Irish to identify the very two sides of reality. For the Irish, on the one hand, reality emerges as a monolithic, obdurate construct, fabricated and observed by the State; and on the other, it materialises as the nation’s memory of economic hardships, political marginalisation, ideological bifurcations, and psychological exiles. By exploring James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1974), this paper shall answer the question that Anderson and Inglis failed to address: what made the contemporary Irish literature a difficult reflection of postcolonial identity, which neither accepts the State’s atavistic nativism nor identifies with neocolonial political mindset? Keywords: Modern Irish Novel; Memory Studies; James Joyce; Flann O’Brien; Postcolonial Literature

Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye by YoungShil Ji & Daniel T. Parker

people can’t touch me. Words are my Praetorian Guard. At a sign from me they leap into the line of fire. Whoever comes at me will feel their spears.” Peter Constantine University of Connecticut BoSeon Shim. Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye. Trans. YoungShil Ji & Daniel T. Parker. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2016. 94 pages. American readers owe their gratitude to White Pine Press and to translators YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker for making BoSeon Shim’s fascinating Korean poetry available to the anglophone audience. As translated into English, Shim is a master of the contemporary style, writing coyly evasive yet personal poems (see WLT, Jan. 2010, 47–49). Shim’s best poems find their energy in the space between what is hidden and what is revealed. The someone always in the corner of BoSeon Shim’s eye is each person he meets in the world, but it is also his lover. It is also himself. The collection opens with a suggestion of depth when Shim writes, “There is countless evidence that we have souls.” The evidence, of course, is in the poems, in their depth-reflecting surfaces. Shim can be overtly political at times, but he is at his best when he is elusively personal, gesturing toward the evidence of his own hidden soul. Shim’s poetic strategy of indirectness results in startling and resonant imagery. “I enjoy / questions that are heavy and subtle as coffee at a funeral home,” he tells us in “Questions.” In one of the collection’s best poems, “Foreigners,” he informs us that “This road reminds me of my father’s journal.” Shim insists on his privacy—as he says in another poem, “Breaking up with you is none of the world’s business”—yet he is surprisingly vulnerable in his privacy. The best example of this emotive indirectness is the wonderful poem “Spending the John Joseph Mathews (1894–1979) is one of Oklahoma’s most revered twentieth century authors. An Osage Indian, he was also one of the first Indigenous authors to gain national renown. Yet fame did not come easily to Mathews, and his personality was full of contradictions. In this captivating biography , Michael Snyder provides the first book-length account of this fascinating figure. Known as “Jo” to all his friends, Mathews had a multifaceted identity. A novelist, naturalist, biographer, historian, and tribal preservationist, he was a true “man of letters.” Snyder draws on a wealth of sources, many of them previously untapped, to narrate Mathews’s story. Much of the writer’s family life—especially his two marriages and his relationships with his two children and two stepchildren—is explored here for the first time. Born in the town of Pawhuska in Indian Territory, Mathews attended the University of Oklahoma before venturing abroad and earning a second degree from Oxford. He served as a flight instructor during World War I, traveled across Europe and northern Africa, and bought and sold land in California. A proud Osage who devoted himself to preserving Osage culture , Mathews also served as tribal councilman and cultural historian for the Osage Nation. By Michael Snyder Foreword by Russ Tall Chief JOHN JOSEPH M AT HE WS LIFE OF AN OSAGE WRITER THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY INSTITUTION. WWW.OU.EDU/EOO $34.95 HARDCOVER · 280 PAGES · 12 B&W ILLUS. WORLDLIT.ORG 109 Night Alone in a Motel,” which begins: “I gaze into an evening ocean branded with clouds. / Waves from my unsalvageable wreck swell toward another wreck.” Such imagery reveals more than mere confession ever could. Shim may remind American readers of John Ashbery’s emotive impressionism. Lines like “A flower falls. / Wandering in time, whirling around / the earlobe of a brief moment,” from the poem “A Flower Falls,” could have been written by Ashbery in his more tender mode. It would be easy to mistake Shim, as it is easy to mistake Ashbery, for a purveyor of cheap surrealism, an easy enough poetic trick. A closer look, however, reveals that Shim’s relationship with the irrational is closer to symbolist than surrealist , or it is surrealist only in the purest sense of the original French movement, in...

СОВРЕМЕННЫЕ ТРЕНДЫ СОЦИАЛЬНО-ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКОЙ ИНТЕГРАЦИИ МИГРАНТОВ-ЦЫГАН В ЕВРОПЕЙСКОМ СОЮЗЕ

Gypsies are not an isolated group, they have a multifaceted identity and national individuality. In order to identify the nature and determinants of Roma migrations, they should be given attention as an ethnically specific community. Roma migration in the past and in the present are dictated by the collective strategies in response to current political and economic changes. Deceptive inconsistency of Gypsy migrations is explained by the heterogeneity of the Roma communities themselves and is manifested in various ways in different countries. Currently, the main participants of the migration are not a community of nomads, but the representatives of the settled Roma communities. The reason for this situation is the significant increase of integration of Roma in the countries of Eastern Europe. This leads to the inclusion of Roma in global migration processes.

“A peculiar time in my life”: making sense of illness and recovery with gynaecological cancer

ABSTRACTPurpose: Worldwide there are nearly 1.1 million new cases of gynaecological cancer annually. In England, uterine, ovarian and cervical cancers comprize the third most common type of new cancer in women. Research with gynaecological cancer patients within 6 months of diagnosis is rare, as is data collection that is roughly contemporaneous with treatment. Our aim was to explore the experiences of women who were, at study entry, within 6 weeks of surgery or were undergoing chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Methods: An interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of data from 16 women in five focus groups was conducted in the UK, exploring women’s experiences of being diagnosed with and treated for gynaecological cancer. Results: Participants conceptualized their experiences temporally, from the shock of diagnosis, through their cancer treatment, to thinking about recovery. They tried to make sense of diagnosis, even with treatment being complete. In the context of the Self-Regulation Model, these women were struggling to interpret a changing and multi-faceted illness identity, and attempting to return to pre-illness levels of health. Conclusions: This study adds to this under-studied time period in cancer survivorship. The results suggest that survivors’ goals may change from returning to pre-illness status to reformulating goals as survival time increases.

Navigating the “delicate relationship between empathy and critical distance”

Purpose This paper features artwork and artists’ statements by middle school students who participated in a research collaboration that involved co-authoring critical literacy curriculum for Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivors Tale (1986) with teacher candidates from the University of Toronto. Design/methodology/approach Youth explored personal and social justice issues through writing and artwork produced in response to Maus. In the process, they navigated what historian Dominick LaCapra (1998) has referred to as the “delicate relationship between empathy and critical distance” (pp. 4-5), between closely identifying with the agonizing experiences Spiegelman documents and using their inquiries to cultivate more critical positionalities and assume activist stances on historical and contemporary social justice issues. Findings As they describe in their brief statements included alongside their artwork, creating these projects allowed youth to bear witness to a terrible moment in human history and to envision how they can make a difference in their own communities. Originality/value This work suggests how the arts can be mobilized in critical literacy as a vehicle to interrogate difficult historical moments and multifaceted identity issues.

Belonging and unbelonging in Fatou Diome’s The belly of the Atlantic

ABSTRACTThis article explores the issue of belonging and unbelonging in The belly of the Atlantic by Fatou Diome. The central factor of reflexivity in the novel is underscored by the elements of positionality, auto-ethnography and intertextuality that promote representations of the self, as well as of local and global socio-political and religious concerns. In this semi-autobiographical narrative, Salie, the protagonist, is portrayed as a migrant writer whose multifaceted identity promotes significant insights into the underbelly of migrant experiences and the split subjectivities of African migrants in Europe. The complex dialogues that result from intertextuality emerge both explicitly and implicitly in significant areas of The belly of the Atlantic, thereby establishing links with writers in local and global places. The intertwining of fact and fiction in this third-generation Senegalese novel evokes a journey from roots to routes through transnational linguistic hybridity and the interweaving of genres. Although Salie’s positionality is shaped by her challenging movements between local and global spaces and places, this fluidity promotes her agency and articulation as an individual, and has the effect of intensifying creativity and self-reflexivity. However, the multiple possibilities of gender activism are not fully explored within the ambit of the human rights agenda in the novel, and the protagonist’s feelings of belonging and unbelonging lead to ambivalence in her representation of Muslim identities in a traditional African context. As the novel has been positively received globally, this factor raises the strong possibility of essentialism in readers’ responses to the cultural and religious identities represented in this text.

Identity, politics, and public policy

ABSTRACTAlthough much has been written about ‘identity politics’ in the narrow sense of the term, students of politics and public policy can take a more systematic look at the connection between identity and politics, as related to public policy. This essay shows that, by putting identity at the center of their analysis of politics and public policy, scholars can gain powerful insight about both explanation and policy prescription. In other words, how actors understand themselves and are seen by others are key aspects of political and policy analysis and they each deserve a systematic and interdisciplinary treatment. The essay suggests this by drawing on recent social science literature, such as identity economics, to explore the relevance of the connection between identity and politics for policy research across different policy areas and regions of the world. Because several of these literatures are seldom discussed together, this essay offers a particularly broad and multi-faceted identity perspective for the analysis of politics and public policy.

Asian Indian American Children's Creative Writing: An Approach for Cultural Preservation

Many children from diverse cultures experience disconnectedness between their home and school. As they attempt to reconcile the conflicts among their multiple worlds, they must negotiate their situatedness in a variety of contexts, i.e., home community versus school, and construct a multifaceted identity. Absent support from school, Asian Indian American adolescents engage in acts of cultural preservation (CP), which, in turn, support their scholastic achievement. This article explores the thematic content of a group of Asian Indian American children's creative writing generated for the Kahani Project—a culturally contextualized version of Writers’ Workshop. In their texts, the six adolescents discuss the importance of their cultural traditions as tools to contest the various micro-aggressions they experience in school. Data from this study argue for cultural inclusion, not only for those at risk, but also for those students who successfully navigate a mainstream curriculum.

Surviving the Wreck: Post-traumatic Writers, Bodies in Transition and the Point of Autobiographical Fiction

ABSTRACTIn autobiographical fiction, the repetition of specific ‘unprocessed’ tropes wherein contextual meaning remains unclear can be likened to the symptomatic ‘flashbacks’ endured by victims of trauma. Virginia Woolf's compulsive use of images of sea, mirrors, and unspoken shame, Jack Kerouac's brothers and angels, J. G. Ballard's empty swimming pools, Melville's tropes of Narcissus and madness and my own return to images of blood and wounding in my work, are part of each writer's attempt to construct a new post-trauma narrative identity. Writing fiction enabled these writers to shake off the fixed subject position dictated by their pasts and construct new and more multifaceted identity narratives as survivor-writers. As Maggie Schauer's work demonstrates, through narrativisation a new ‘sense of perceived identity may emerge: ‘who I am now’ and ‘who I was’ when trauma struck. These narratives comprise the past as a story written post-traumatically, and a new identity (as a survivor/writer) they have narrated for themselves. Autobiographical fiction, therefore, may be central to understanding the function of self-narrative in the construction of post-trauma identities. This essay considers what such texts can tell us about trauma and the body, trauma narratives and autobiographical fictions, and writing and post-traumatic identity.

Lord Byron’s Sour Fruit

An awareness of Byron’s multifaceted sexual identity is gradually emerging, and is no longer restricted to a few academic publications. It has not been easy to arrive at this, partly because Byron himself preferred to keep these experiences to himself, sharing them only with those few friends who were similarly inclined. Besides the importance of women in his life, Byron was strongly attracted to boys, especially those around the age of fifteen, who are referred to in Don Juan as ‘sour fruits’. He had several same-sex experiences in England, through the circle around him and specifically Charles Skinner Matthews, as well as during his Grand Tour. Owing to the revelation of these previously concealed biographical details, different readings of Byron’s literary work have been flourishing in recent years. Thus, numerous allusions to Byron’s hidden life or, rather, to his complex sexual life, which included adultery and incest as well homosexuality, have been gradually brought to light. These references were often purged from the published editions, as a result of the author’s decisions, or conveyed through particular codes, which could be interpreted only by a few people. The poems for John Edleston and Lukas Chalandritsanos, though, now reveal their true content without difficulties.

Migrant identities in narrative practice

From an interpretive, post-structuralist perspective, this paper analyzes the discursive constructions of fluid migrant identities through the lens of narrative practice. I describe the presentations of the Self /the Other which get inscribed in a series of truncated stories mobilized by three unsheltered Ghanaians who lived on a bench in a Catalan town. I explore their self-attributed /other-ascribed social categories and argue that these multifaceted identity acts are a lens into how heterogeneous migrant networks apprehend social exclusion in their host societies. I show that a narrative approach to the interactional processes of migrant identity construction may be revealing of these populations’ social structuration practices, which are ‘internally’ regulated in off-the-radar economies of meaning. I problematize hegemonic conceptions that present migrants as agency-less, decapitalized storied Selves, and suggest that stagnated populations may also be active tellers who act upon companions and rivals, when fighting for transnational survival in contexts of precariousness.

In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn's Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication

Recently, Brooklyn has seen an explosion of drag culture, with dozens of performers taking the stage in any given week. Social media plays a vital role for members of this community, simultaneously allowing self-promotion and community solidarity. Drawing on focus group interviews, we analyze the communication practices of Brooklyn's drag performers, examining both the advantages and drawbacks of social media platforms. Using conceptual frameworks of faceted identity and relational labor, our discussion focuses on affordances and constraints of multifaceted identity in online contexts and theories of seamful design. We contend that by analyzing online communication practices of drag performers, it becomes possible to identify gaps between embedded ideologies of mainstream social media technologies and the localized values of outsider communities.

Inside Hezbollah: The al‐Mahdi Scouts, Education, and Resistance

AbstractThis article analyzes the al‐Mahdi Scouts, a Lebanese scout group affiliated with Hezbollah. After introducing Hezbollah's social services in Lebanon, the al‐Mahdi Scouts' multifaceted identity and main activities are illustrated. The role in Lebanese society is investigated, along with its cooperation with other scout groups in Lebanon, which takes place mostly within the framework of the Lebanese Scout Federation. I also highlight two controversial issues that emerged in the research. First, it is shown how blurred the distinction is between education and indoctrination. Second, the accusations of terrorism are considered, with two possible approaches identified. The first one looks at Hezbollah as a homogeneous organization, while the second one distinguishes between its military, political, and social wings. While the first approach can legitimately accuse the al‐Mahdi Scouts of terrorism, I argue that the second one is more appropriate because it judges them for their own actions. We cannot just look at this group as Hezbollah's recruitment tool, because its role is more complex and significant. This group provides a portion of Lebanese youth with skills to improve their future and succeed in life, even if it does so by propagating Hezbollah's ideals and beliefs.

Immigrant Arab adolescents in ethnic enclaves: physical and phenomenological contexts of identity negotiation.

Ecologically embedded social identity theories were used to examine the risk and protective factors associated with the identity negotiation and adjustment of recent immigrant Arab (IA) adolescents to the United States residing in ethnic enclaves. Yemeni, Lebanese, and Iraqi 8th-graders (n = 45) from 4 ethnic enclave schools participated in focus-group interviews. In-depth analyses of interviews revealed that living in an ethnic enclave enhanced IA adolescents' feelings of belonging to the community. However, the new immigrant status coupled with country of origin determined the permeability of intergroup boundaries with well-established Arab and Arab American peers. Their identity negotiations and social identity salience (national, religious, and pan-Arab) were informed by transitional experiences from home to host country and the prevailing political and cultural tensions between the two, recognition of national hierarchy within the Arab community, perceptions of discrimination by the larger society, changed educational aspirations consequent to immigration, and current physical (school and community) and phenomenological contexts. Findings suggest that current theoretical perspectives should be extended to incorporate phenomenological representations of past spaces and places not currently occupied to understand adolescents' multifaceted identity.

Challenges of adolescent psychology in the European identity context.

In Europe, the question of identity and youth civic engagement constitutes a challenge both for the European Union (EU) and for research on adolescent psychology. In this article, we discuss the European historical context and the current initiatives from the EU that aim to encourage civic engagement among young people. Then, we suggest some research directions in youth civic engagement and identity formation, which could contribute to the facilitation of the initiative drawn by the EU. These directions include (a) understanding the role and the dynamics of the sense of belonging to the different levels of social communities into sociocultural contexts (such as continental, national), and (b) the development of civic engagement during adolescence integrating the various components of civic engagement and identity formation processes. Finally, (c) the specificities of sociocultural contexts and the diversity of multifaceted identity with regard to cultural, social, and ethnic groups should be taken into account.

Woman, Civilian, Veteran, Student: The Multifaceted Identity of Female Service Members

Woman, Civilian, Veteran, Student: The Multifaceted Identity of Female Service Members

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

Cumbia! Scenes of a Migrant Latin American Music Genre

The 11 essays compiled in this volume present the reader with different scenes of a music genre that has become fully engaged with the global marketplace. Based on extensive fieldwork on multiple sites, they challenge us to recognize cumbia as a transnational and global musical phenomenon rather than a genre in a strict sense. One of the coeditors, Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste, thus contends that “cumbia offers a vehicle of study unlike any other, providing an enormous opportunity to explore the arbitrariness of our ways of conceiving of the idea of nation, above all, in terms of rhythm and difference” (p. 248). Music is still central to what culture sounds like, but as music increasingly links the global and the local and vice versa, questions emerge regarding what this new music expresses and represents. Indeed, DJ Shaggy's dancehall version of Colombian accordionist Alberto Pacheco's classic “Cumbia Cienaguera,” the mascot song for the 2008 European soccer championship that put millions of sports fans on their feet, bears little resemblance to the regional ritmo of coastal Colombia. First documented in the late nineteenth century in a Cartagena newspaper in reference to a couples' dance, cumbia retains its name even as it mutates from a regional genre with strong ethnic and social connotations into a national and transnational music-and-dance phenomenon. Cumbia's international travels and appearance in cosmopolitan contexts, however, call for sophisticated social and cultural analyses that consider shifts in meaning for both music producers and consumers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, they are foremost interested in the various and complicated ways in which cumbia takes root in and shapes distinct national cultures. Thus, identity politics are at the core of the authors' interest in cumbia in its various national forms — Colombian, Mexican, Peruvian, Argentine, and Uruguayan, among others. These politics include articulations of ethnic, racial, class, gender, regional, national, and transnational identifications.The present analyses of cumbia as a traveling genre of global extension follow pioneering studies by Fernández L'Hoeste in 2007 and Deborah Pacini Hernandez in 2010. In a chapter from the latter, “From Cumbia Colombiana to Cumbia Cosmopolatina,” Pacini Hernandez asked about the conclusions that might be drawn from the recent and simultaneous movement of music, people, and identities in Latin America. The contributors to Cumbia! have taken up the challenge to examine various identifications linked to migration processes as cumbia traveled and continues to travel throughout the Americas. Their conclusions, however, are far from uniform. Maybe the only constant that emerges from their case studies is the link between cumbia (in its various forms) and the lower and working classes, which gives rise to multifaceted identity negotiations and constructions. A tropical music genre, the infinitely malleable cumbia seems to be particularly suited for the marginalized and stigmatized migrant and working classes as it responds to their dreams, aspirations, and ambitions to carve out a legitimate place in the societies of their respective countries. Peripheralization and centralization are practices that help us understand the ways in which localized idioms of distinction are created. Cumbiera practices across the Americas, each characterized by its own distinct histories of migration and racialized class articulations, illustrate that ideas regarding urban modernity and sophistication hinge on constructions of local traditions empowered by foreign customs and modern technologies. Whether it be cumbia in any of its forms — colombiana, sonidera, norteña, villera, andina, or tecno-cumbia — the authors demonstrate how cumbia's ritmo suits local musical preferences to transform cumbia into nuestra cumbia (our cumbia).Versions of some of the essays have been previously published, but it is nevertheless valuable to have them all collected in this volume. Together they introduce the reader to a broad range of Latin American musical practices that claim their roots in a specific regional genre but mean different things in different places. Cumbia! is essential reading for anyone interested in popular music studies, music and migration, globalization, and communication. The volume is accessible to nonmusic specialists — the authors avoid engaging in musical analysis beyond the basics — but the overall scholarly writing style might pose a challenge to a general readership.