National Affiliation Research Articles

THE ‘RUMI PHENOMENON’ BETWEEN ORIENTALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM The Case of Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love

Since 1994 the American literary market has been taken by storm by what may be called the ‘Rumi phenomenon’: the posthumous literary success of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet and mystic, Muhammad Jalal ad-Din Balkhi, known to the Anglophone world as Rumi. Rumi has become the best-selling poet in the United States and a series of epigones fictionalising the poet’s biography and expanding on the impact of his poetry on American culture have been generated. This article focuses on Elif Shafak’s 2010 novel, The Forty Rules of Love, as one of the best known and most remarkable contributions to the Rumi phenomenon. In her domestication of the figure of Rumi for an American audience, the Turkish author not only succumbs to the oversimplification and decontextualisation of Rumi’s work perpetrated by the American initiators of the Rumi phenomenon, but also employs Orientalist strategies in the ways in which she positions the East as being instrumental to the West. Shafak’s advocacy of a cosmopolitan, global society, where national affiliations become obsolete, clashes with her open adherence to the needs and aesthetics of the American literary market. Such a difficult coexistence results in a problematic notion of cosmopolitanism, which appears inextricably bound to the logics of empire. Yet, in spite of the problematic cosmopolitanism it portrays, the novel succeeds in creating a form of transatlantic cultural kinship between Turkey and the United States.

Israeli Employers' Hiring Intentions for Recruiting Employees With Disabilities: How Do They Compare With U.S. Employers?

Focus groups were used to study differences between Israeli and U.S. nonprofit and for-profit employers' hiring intentions of potential employees with disabilities. Major differences were found between for-profit and nonprofit employers' hiring intentions rather than according to their national affiliation. However, U.S. for-profit employers would hire primarily entry-level and seasonal employees when market conditions allowed for it. In contrast, their Israeli counterparts thought that hiring people with disabilities at subminimum wage was an incentive to hire, regardless of the state of the economy. The findings are discussed with respect to the applicability of the theory of planned behavior and social work practice in the two countries.

INTERCULTURAL LITERATURE IN ITALIAN LANGUAGE IN THE MIDST OF NATIONAL LITERATURES

When speaking about the literature of Croatia's Italian minority, its beginnings can be traced to 1945. Newly formed borders, the immigration influx into Italy and overseas regions, the fleeing of left-wing oriented citizens, especially intellectuals, out of Italy, a new socio-political order all lay the groundwork for the creation of a specific, albeit very developed minority's literature. However, it should be taken into account that whilst the literature of the minority was developing in Croatia, the diaspora's literature also began to appear. In this essay, we will present a summarized depiction of these two literatures as well as their mutual relationship from both an Italian and Croatian perspective. We have deliberately avoided using the term «literature of the Italian minority», as it is important to note that use of a certain language doesn’t necessarily imply national affiliation with a certain national group and there generally exist differing opinions, especially in Rijeka, as to the criteria used to define affiliation as such.

Linguistique coloniale au XIXe siècle: Le discours racialiste dans la recherche française sur les langues créoles

Abstract Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a strong racist discourse was displayed in texts about Creole languages. Authors such as Mauritius-born Charles Baissac established explanations about the emergence of Creole languages and their specific structure, arguing that these particularities can only be seen as a result of contact between two races of different physical, mental, and social predispositions. As shown in Edward Said's “Orientalism,” scientific work in philology (and other disciplines) cannot be separated from structures of power and domination. Creole languages formed an urgent problem for colonial France as they initially emerged from the prestigious French language and yet had to be integrated into the paradigm of inferiority of colonized peoples and cultures. Linguistic descriptions of Creoles are therefore marked with a strong effort to reconcile the French heritage of these languages with the claim of domination over the community of Creole speakers. Still, contradictions and nuances in the texts of late-nineteenth-century research on Creole languages, carried out often by native speakers who had grown up in the colonies, may help to identify statements that transport an individual view of the triangular relation between language, race, and mind. Even in its not quite institutionalized state as a discipline, early creolistics displays a remarkable degree of cross-national connections that demonstrate how difficult it is to classify philological branches along national affiliation.

Covering the Dead

This paper explores the meeting point of photojournalism and death and maps the tensions involved. Most of the literature on news-media and death explores the problematics of covering death during wartime. Less attention has been given to violent death in civic settings (as opposed to war zones) and to mundane deaths. The civic death scenes are not subject to military or governmental censorship, and the moral and professional burden to report such events falls on the journalists' shoulders. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the representation of death in Israeli news-media. Findings from interviews and a quantitative content analysis shed light on journalistic practices, and show how the news-media self-regulate their working practices. Lastly, the paper identifies breakdowns of this self-regulated mechanism as it points at two different approaches to presenting death images according to the national affiliation of the dead. The paper argues that these practices delineate and maintain the distinction between Israelis and “the Other”.

Skiing Before 1914 in France: A Means of Diffusing National Identity

This study attempts to analyse the means by which winter sports were spread in France. I look more specifically at the political factors that promoted the development of skiing, within the context of international tension that prevailed during the years prior to World War I. My analysis strives to demonstrate the importance of discourse and actions centred on patriotism, and to point out the factors that brought skiing into people's everyday lives and helped them acquire a sense of national affiliation. My approach consists of analysing the justifications given for the promotion of skiing on France's mountain ranges, particularly those aimed at its mountain populations. The forms of legitimacy used to justify the development of skiing, its close-knit relations with the army, the institutional framework selected under the influence of the French Alpine Club, the staging of practices and forms of sociability maintained for each targeted population – all of these phenomena help grasp the ways in which new norms dictating social behaviours were disseminated and internalised in the mountains of France.

An Interview with Patrick Flanery

An Interview with Patrick Flanery Christopher Holmes (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Courtesy of Patrick Flanery [End Page 426] When A. S. Byatt prefaced her selections for The Guardian’s best books of 2012 with the declaration that British fiction is “going through an extraordinarily various and imaginative period,” she was unwittingly claiming Patrick Flanery, the Nebraska-raised, Oxford-educated author of a novel about postapartheid South Africa, as a Brit. This kind of extranational imaginary is not unique in the life of British fiction; indeed, the Man Booker Prize makes an annual show of reconstituting the Empire as a literary territory, prizing postcolonial literatures as its own. But Byatt’s recommendation of Flanery’s extraordinary first novel, Absolution, says something further about the state of world literature, specifically the actual production of literatures that imagine cultures and geographies unbound by national borders. In this revitalized moment for world literature, the place of production and the writer’s national affiliation(s) are more often than not marginalized by discussions of what Wai Chee Dimock, in Through Other Continents, calls the “complex tangle of relations” bound up in the “shorthand” of national literatures (3). Dimock specifically argues for American literature, long chided for its provincial navel-gazing, as a national literary tradition ironically forged from its relations with the transnational languages, cultures, and influences of the world. Flanery grows that argument exponentially to include the South African landscape in American literature. [End Page 427] Absolution contributes to the growing canon of Anglophone literatures that imagine the historical circumstances of non-Western peoples and places, while simultaneously challenging the discursive capabilities of history, politics, memory, and story to narrate the most fraught moments in the life of a nation. Set during the interregnum just before and after the fall of the apartheid government in South Africa, Flanery’s Absolution is a Rash-omon of interdependent narratives, each claiming some territory of the elusive truth about two killings of familial and national consequence. The failure of those narratives to draw a complete picture of the events and their aftereffects forms the heart of the novel’s conviction that the novelist, the memoirist, the historian, and even the censor share a common responsibility and peril: when faced with the failure of narrative to adequately capture human events, an account must still be written, however fragile and incomplete. Absolution chronicles the story of the aging writer Clare Wald and her would-be biographer, Sam Leroux, as they wrestle with the ghosts of a conjoined history overshadowed by the legacy of apartheid, and with the fragile narrative pieces of a nation in transition. Flanery’s refusal to resolve those compelling fragments, to bind the characters to a rigid ethics, characterizes the thoughtfulness with which he approaches such delicate source material. Absolution casts its drama across the landscapes of Johannesburg and the Eastern and Western Cape provinces with what the South African writer and literary critic Michael Titlestad calls an “impeccably local” idiom and diction. This is a novel concerned with historical reckonings, with the individual’s attempt to craft a narrative from the manifold discourses and voices that lay claim to the truth of social and institutional violence and its aftershocks. Flanery’s focal character, Clare, remarks on her own attempts to make sense of her conflicted past and present in South Africa: There are two things to say about that. First, that history is not always correct, because it cannot tell all the stories that have been, cannot account for everything that happened. . . . Second, that the record of memory, even a flawed memory, has its own kind of truth. [End Page 428] And indeed the novel reads as a series of interwoven, elegant, and terrifying flawed memories. Flanery’s novel works between gut and intellect with a brutal beauty that seems at once precisely attuned to apartheid’s setting while portraying a broader geography of state atrocities, as in this description of torture: “Before killing you they would burn the names from your mouth, pull syllables from your fingernails, soak vowels and consonants from your nostrils, remind you of their authority with steel and wire, electricity and fire” (88). Absolution is also...

Linguistique coloniale au XIX e siècle: Le discours racialiste dans la recherche française sur les langues créoles

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a strong racist discourse was displayed in texts about Creole languages. Authors such as Mauritius-born Charles Baissac established explanations about the emergence of Creole languages and their specific structure, arguing that these particularities can only be seen as a result of contact between two races of different physical, mental, and social predispositions. As shown in Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” scientific work in philology (and other disciplines) cannot be separated from structures of power and domination. Creole languages formed an urgent problem for colonial France as they initially emerged from the prestigious French language and yet had to be integrated into the paradigm of inferiority of colonized peoples and cultures. Linguistic descriptions of Creoles are therefore marked with a strong effort to reconcile the French heritage of these languages with the claim of domination over the community of Creole speakers. Still, contradictions and nuances in the texts of late-nineteenth-century research on Creole languages, carried out often by native speakers who had grown up in the colonies, may help to identify statements that transport an individual view of the triangular relation between language, race, and mind. Even in its not quite institutionalized state as a discipline, early creolistics displays a remarkable degree of cross-national connections that demonstrate how difficult it is to classify philological branches along national affiliation.

Crise da cultura?

Neste artigo, depois de apresentar algumas das perspectivas referentes à associação contempo­rânea entre cultura e crise, examinaremos as questões da exceção cultural, da diversidade de expressões culturais, da filiação nacional e da globalização, procurando ressaltar a pluralidade das perspectivas envolvidas.

‘Now she’s all hat and ideas’: Fashioning the British Suffrage Movement

In H. G. Wells’ ([1909] 2005) novel Ann Veronica, Ann Veronica’s father and another man reminisce that while the burgeoning Suffragette used to be ‘all hair and legs’, it seems that ‘Now she’s all hat and ideas’. The men’s inability to distinguish between Ann Veronica’s hats and her ideas directly equates with England’s larger concerns over how a woman’s fashion, an outward marker, offers personal insight into her otherwise hidden political and national affiliations. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) encouraged its Suffragettes to dress fashionably, respectably and well so that their political beliefs and violent techniques never called into question their inherent and true Englishness. The WSPU used women’s fashionable dress to offer an overtly political argument: women could be both fashionable Englishwomen and militant Suffragettes. Further, the WSPU urged working-class Suffragettes to protest in their regional dress – Scottish kilts, Welsh hats, or Lancashire shawls and clogs, for example – to present a visual connection between Women’s Suffrage and British nationalism. When Suffragettes paid particular attention to the outward markers of self and femininity, they did so to claim participation in nation and to maintain association with traditional femininity in order to legitimize their efforts to an audience potentially hostile to their cause. This article argues that Victorian and Edwardian women championing for the Vote chose fashions that adhered to traditional gender and national roles in order to prove that national allegiance and social transgression were synonymous, that the role of Suffragette was not marginal but rather central to the consensus, and that fictional and nonfictional Suffragettes could be both politically and fashionably capable.

Witnessing in Black: Jehovah's Witnesses, Textual Ethnogenesis, Racial Subjectivity, and the Foundational Politics of Theocracy

This article attempts to show how the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (Jehovah's Witnesses), has systematically worked to construct an anti-racial religious identity, through a multi-decade campaign against ethnic and national affiliation. Through a close analysis of Watchtower periodicals, pamphlets, and polemical literature, this work considers the ways that the Society has narrated specific historical examples of race-based political projects, to argue for a supra-statal, theocratic ethnicity that draws upon the aesthetic, cultural, and political sensibilities of predominately White, exclusively American male, leadership. For Witnesses, the legacy of the holocaust continues to loom large in Watchtower positions on race and nation. Given this legacy, I argue that the ideological work that occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War created new possibilities for the articulation of race politics that curtailed many meaningful opportunities for a truly multi-ethnic, multi-racial Watchtower Society. This was one where the expression and performance of cultural difference could be seen as a constructive rather than destructive constituent of one's religious identity. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the Watchtower Society is interested in its own form of nation-building, and that this political project requires the consistent delegitimization of all other national formations.

World City Typologies and National City System Deterritorialisation: USA, China and Japan

The research constitutes the first effort to test the claim found in the world city theoretical literature that, as world cities strengthen ties with each other, their linkages with their countries’ hinterlands and national urban systems will weaken. This research offers a more nuanced exploration of this hypothesis by taking into account variation in the nature of the state across countries in which world cities are located as well as the source of global capital in the world cities. Specifically, the research reported here suggests that three types of world cities—market-centred bourgeois world cities (MWC), state-centred political bureaucratic world cities (SWC) and dual-role world cities (DWC)—entail different deterritorialisation outcomes. Three countries that have prototypical global cities—Japan (SWC), China (DWC) and the US (MWC) are compared, applying longitudinal network modelling to relational data on national city networks. From 1993 to 2007, more globally connected MWCs weakened their national ties. In contrast, higher global status has no significant effect on the integration of SWCs or DWCs with their national urban systems. This indicates that the type of state, but not the source of capital, conditions whether the world city will deterritorialise vis-à-vis its national city system.

Group and Individual Level Cultural Influences in Intra-Cultural and Intercultural Negotiation between German and Chinese Negotiators

The present study analyzes the impact of culture on negotiation behavior in German and Chinese intra- and intercultural business negotiations mainly focusing on the seller role. We find more distributive and less integrative negotiation behavior among intracultural Chinese compared to intracultural German negotiations. While confirming that the national cultural value scores from the GLOBE project apply to our samples we also find evidence that horizontal collectivism and vertical individualism as individual cultural values are suitable to reflect intracultural diversity and add considerable explanatory power to predict observed negotiation behavior compared to national affiliation only. We also show how adaptation processes from intra- to intercultural negotiations on the part of the seller happen: While the German seller adapts his/her level of distributive behavior to Chinese levels, s/he maintains the higher level of integrative behavior used in intracultural German negotiations.

Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Duquette’s study centers on a question: “When one nation becomes two, or when two nations become one, what does national affiliation mean or require?” (p. 15). She answers with a study of loyalty and allegiance, using literature and political writing on the Civil War both during and after the conflict as her primary texts. The Civil War, she argues, “restructured assumptions about allegiance, replacing sympathy with loyalty” (p. 3). In the first chapter of her chronologically organized work, Duquette focuses on the Union: sympathy, based on arbitrary and unruly emotion, suddenly seemed to have treasonous dimensions, and “in its stead, Northerners lauded the virtue of loyalty” (p. 23). In chapter 2 she examines two texts from the Civil War’s aftermath, John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868), both of which “couple the concept of loyalty with the seemingly paradoxical claim that freedom’s fullest expression occurs under the watchful eye of authority” (p. 65). Duquette’s next chapter, in which she argues that Henry James used his novel The Bostonians (1886) to decry the way the war created binaries of good and evil, offering “a bleak assessment of a future in which passion would trump law and its forms,” is in many ways her most coherent (p. 136). Duquette’s last two chapters explore questions of race, allegiance, and nationhood: in chapter 4, “Loyalty’s Slaves,” she looks closely at the ways African American writers made sense of the “loyal slave” trope, and in chapter 5, “Philosophies of Loyalty,” she examines Josiah Royce and W. E. B. Du Bois’s powerful arguments “for a flexible yet committed understanding of moral abstractions” (p. 15).

The Generalizability of Students’ Interests in Biology Across Gender, Country and Religion

In order to bridge the existing gap between biology curricula and students’ interests in biology, a strategy for identifying students’ interest based on their questions and integrating them into the curriculum was developed. To characterize the level of generalizability of students’ science interests over 600 high school students from Portugal, Turkey, England and Israel, who chose biology as an advanced subject, their interest level was ranked in 36 questions that were originally raised by Israeli students. Results indicate that students from four different countries show interest in similar science questions. The most intriguing questions were the ones that dealt with human health and new developments in reproduction and genetics. Religious affiliation had the strongest effect on students’ interest level, followed by national affiliation and gender. The findings suggest that students’ interest in one context is relevant to the development of interest-based learning materials in a different context. However, despite these similarities, cultural and sociological differences need to be taken into account.

Around the boundary: alcohol and older Caribbean-Canadian men

This article examines the alcohol-infused leisure practices of a group of older Afro-Caribbean men in Canada. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Greater Toronto Area, which has a large diasporic Caribbean community, this article examines the ways alcohol consumption at cricket grounds plays an integral role in the reproduction of club members’ gender as well as their homeland cultures, age, class and national identities. In 2008 and 2009 data were collected with a group of cricketers and spectators through observation, casual conversation, participation in social events and 27 in-depth formal interviews with male players and spectators. Findings reveal that drinking at the cricket ground is a means for Caribbean men to mask the effects of old age (limping, forgetfulness and declining physical strength), and thereby renew their investment in hegemonic masculinity. Drinking also enables them to temporarily escape their wives and domestic labour as well as circumvent childcare. Through the brands they consume they perform their class distinctions and celebrate their Canadian and Caribbean national affiliations and transnational mobilities. Drinking at the cricket ground is a means to embrace and challenge dominant gender stereotypes.

Liczebność diaspory polskiej w Obwodzie Kaliningradzkim Federacji Rosyjskiej. Zarys problematyki

The issues related to Polish minority in the countries of the former Soviet Union have been intensively studied, especially since the early 1990s. It is however impossible to determine a precise number of the members of Polish minority residing in the Kaliningrad Oblast of the Russian Federation. This results from the imprecise and incomplete data presented by the local administration. The most optimistic statistics estimate Polish minority at approximately 20,000 people. On the other hand, when one refers to the ‘strict’ but certainly underestimated official data a number of nearly 5,000 is mentioned. Additionally, the issue of national affiliation is frequently related to the subjective perception of ethnic identity by the residents of the territory in question. Therefore, even though some Polish ties do exist, they do not necessarily translate directly into a mature Polish national identity, let alone the intention to admit such identity.

Geographical analysis of the academic brain drain in Italy

To study the behavior of Italian researchers living in Italy with a view to creating appropriate policies to tackle the brain drain and discourage academics from weight in driving emigrating, we constructed a survey based on a sample of 4,700 Italian researchers (assistant professors) in several universities in Italy. The outlook is far from rosy: Italian researchers are generally dissatisfied with the economic and social situation of the country. Strong family ties represent the element keeping them at home in Italy. In this regard, no particular differences were noted between the North and South of the country. In analyzing the Italian academic system we identified factors that have greater weight in driving Italian intellectual talent to emigrate: the country’s higher education system leaves all dissatisfied. Furthermore, we discovered other factors that, albeit weak, keep Italian researchers in Italy. However, one wonders how much longer family and national ties will be able to keep Italian skilled agents in Italy, and whether such dissatisfaction may jeopardize the country’s future economic development.

Coping with Islamophobia: The effects of religious stigma on Muslim minorities’ identity formation

Islamophobic sentiments in the Western world have gained scientific attention, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. However, the effects of religious stigma on Muslim minorities’ identity formation have rarely been studied. Using structural equation modeling, this cross-sectional study examined direct and indirect effects of different forms of religious stigma on the national affiliation of 210 Norwegian-Pakistani and 216 German-Turkish Muslims. Furthermore, the study examined the mediator role of religious identity. Our results suggest that being a Muslim in Norway is more reconcilable with affiliating with the nation than being a Muslim in Germany. However, across the samples, the results indicated that various forms of religious stigma affected Muslims’ national identity and engagement in the public and private sphere in distinct ways. These effects were both positive and negative, differed between the two samples, and in Germany, were mediated by the participants’ religious identity. The findings indicated that the ways in which religious stigma influences Muslims’ national affiliation is context and culture bound.

An Epistolary Account of the Irish Rising of 1641 by the Wife of the Mayor of Waterford [with text

AbstractThis essay introduces to a new audience a challenging, remarkable, and virtually unknown series of letters written by the wife of the Mayor of Waterford during the Irish rising of 1641. As she charts the dramatic course of the conflict in that city, Mayoress Briver attempts to explain to her doubting audience—the men leading the defense against the Irish Catholics—why her supposedly loyal husband was unable to prevent Waterford's fall. In their ambivalences, complexities, and strange silences, the letters open a window into the ethnic and religious tensions of mid‐seventeenth century Ireland. But they also offer a fresh understanding of female authorship and gendered agency in the early modern period by suggesting how women's writing might be shaped by the author's national affiliation and geographical location. As an example of Irish women's writing, the letters represent an important addition to the canon of early modern women's writing. (N. M.)