Native Audiences Research Articles

A comparative analysis of Indian sign language recognition using deep learning models

Sign language is a form of communication where people use bodily gestures, particularly those of hands and arms. This method of communication is put into motion when spoken communication is unattainable or disfavored. There are very few people who can translate sign language and readily understand them. It would be convenient for the hearing-impaired to have a platform where their sign language could be translated easily. Hence, through this study, with the help of artificial neural networks, we wish to compare how various widely implemented deep learning architectures respond to faultless translation of Indian sign language for the native audience. This research would streamline the development of software tools that can accurately predict or translate ISL. For the purpose of understanding the method of training the machine and exploring our model’s performance without any optimizations, a Convolutional Neural Network architecture was implemented. Over the course of our research, there have been several Pre-trained Transfer Learning Models implemented that have yielded promising results. The research aims to contrast how various convolutional neural networks perform while translating Indian Sign Actions on a custom dataset that factors in illumination, angles, and different backgrounds to provide a balanced and distinctive set of images. The goal of this study is to make clear comparisons between the various deep learning frameworks. Hence, a fresh Indian sign language dataset is introduced. Since every dataset in the field of deep learning has special properties that may be utilized for the betterment of the existing models, the development of a fresh dataset could be viewed as a development in the field. The optimum model for our task: classification of these gestures is found to be ResNet-50 (Accuracy = 98.25% and F1-score = 99.34%), and the least favorable was InceptionNet V3 (Accuracy = 66.75%, and F1-score = 70.89%).

Can a Kathakali (‘story-play’) hold a performance reading?

The reformulation of the world heritage, on the one hand, and the discontinuity of contemporary art on the other congregate at the agency of the performing subject. Yet, the partitioning of synchronicity and diachronicity concur at new cultural sites and conjunctions of ethos to allow discursive stylization, giving ample scope for studying acts of performance in contact. In this perspective, the Kathakali Nāṭyōtpatti (‘birth of theatre’), a new production recently presented at the Kalamandalam Kūttampalam traditional theatre of Kerala, makes performance strategies visible enough to gain insight into the super roles densely packed into the work of art. The article seeks the story maker in the position of the story teller, especially in this presentation on the origins of dance where a young generation of theatre artists are underway to find more or less new paths in understanding what they perform. Judging from the small attendance, a mix of teachers, dance students and members of the local audience who gathered at the opening night of a puttiyakatha (‘new Kathakali story’), some scratching their heads, others peeping into their notes on the play in search of points of reference in the story, a sense of unfamiliarity pervaded the atmosphere at the presentation of Nāṭyōtpatti (‘The Birth of a Theatre/Dance/Music’) in Kerala. To the native audience, a Kathakali performance bearing upon the Nāṭyaśāstra, the Indian holy book on theatre, dance, music and the theatre arts, could be as exotic as a Kathakali Shakespeare. Kathakali has long been associated with the epics and the Pūraṇas. Dealing with the birth of dance through the medium of dance might appear auto-referential. But that gave the theatrical event an overlay to its aesthetic expression. And yet turning to the śāstra to go back to the origins of theatre and dance, the Kathakali dance theatre exposes itself as a mode of representation, and warrants a reflection on its formative years and the ongoing process of transformation involved in its narrative and dramatic devices.

THEATRE IN THE DIGITAL AGE: CHALLENGES AND AUDIENCE VIEWING EXPERIENCES

A digital native audience may find it more difficult to be captivated by a theatrical performance in the age of technology, yet theater has evolved and survived every technological advancement. The popularity of the plays in Shakespeare's day appears to have been largely dependent on audience behavior, much as it was in the times of Aristophanes and Plautus. In our local Pakistani context, the study investigates whether theater can survive in the present digital media landscape and addresses the key elements that can affect a viewer's decision to see theater in a live setting. A good play, production, and performance are evaluated by audiences who are highly "theatre-literate. Despite the latest developments in technology, there are audiences who are essentially motivated by human interaction and insight, who yearn for the live experience, who appreciate being live in the room with the entertainer and that audience is the reason for the survival of theatre in a digital age. A survey method is utilized to collect data from 200 theater-savvy audiences in order to glean the most pertinent information and enhance the analysis of the information gathered. The results will demonstrate that regular theatergoers choose to attend theater live rather than for free online in order to experience a sense of relationship with the performers and other audience members. The majority of theatergoers said that attending live theater in an era of digital technology was still very much worthwhile. Because theater is a global cultural phenomenon that exists in all societies, the study is important on both a national and international level. Keywords: Theatre, Digital culture, Technology, Audience, Liveness, Brecht Theatre.

Ninagawa’s Ancient Journeys

The Japanese director Ninagawa Yukio, who directed all four of the Roman plays between 2004 and 2014, noted the challenge he faced in making Shakespeare’s Roman settings accessible for native audiences, his typical strategy being Japanisation. Ninagawa’s Brechtian strategy works two ways in offering audiences a helpful perspective on cultural difference while harnessing Shakespeare’s humanism to the anti-rational energies of his theatre that modernity had earlier suppressed. This article explores the mythopoeic aspect of Ninagawa’s project first in the context of comparative religion and then with an analysis of his Antony and Cleopatra (2011), which was innovative in casting a Japanese-Korean actress from the western Kansai region as Cleopatra against an established Tokyo actor. The polytheism that native Shinto has in common with ancient Roman religion is a significant subtext.

Cultural Continuance and Agency in Cherokee Biographical Digital Storytelling

The concepts of Native American cultural continuance and agency have become critical elements of both preserving, sharing, and extending the culture of Indigenous Americans into the future. Digital media platforms offer Native American nations a new opportunity to reach both a Native audience and society at large and contradict traditional media's cultural stereotypes and misrepresentation. Therefore, this qualitative content analysis of Cherokee Nation digital media explores what elements of cultural continuance and cultural agency are found in biographical digital storytelling. Using the key concepts extracted from the literature (visibility, envisioning a future, creative authority and autonomy, authenticity, and disrupting dominant norms) as the focus, six themes emerged from Cherokee Nation articles and documentaries.

From Madame Butterfly to M. Butterfly: Changing Narratives of Oriental Womanhood

Throughout its performance history, Madame Butterfly (1904) by Giacomo Puccini has attracted significant intrigue and controversies. Through its protagonist Cio-Cio San, the opera depicts Asian femininity as weak-willed, servile and ultimately powerless in the face of Western forces. This paper will examine the trajectory of this narrative of Orientalism through Madame Butterfly and its two modern adaptations, Miss Saigon (1989) and M. Butterfly (1993). Through an analysis of both informal and formal sources, this study will show how the Orientalist womanhood is first accepted and embraced by the native audiences of Madame Butterfly, is rejected by the audiences of Miss Saigon and finally subverted in M. Butterfly. The transformations in critical receptions of the three works alongside changing historical and political contexts reflect a gradual evolution in society’s views of East-West power relations, national identity, and the constructs of femininity and gender.

Au boulot: savoir lire, écrire, compter en français pour travailler—Livre 1 par Valérie Vermurie

Reviewed by: Au boulot: savoir lire, écrire, compter en français pour travailler—Livre 1 par Valérie Vermurie Clotilde Landais Vermurie, Valérie. Au boulot: savoir lire, écrire, compter en français pour travailler—Livre 1. PUG, 2019. ISBN 978-2-7061-4293-2. Pp. 160. In Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) pedagogy, literacy teaching is often overlooked. Au boulot 1 is a "cahier d'activités" created in part for migrant adults who need to develop not only the usual four skills in language learning, but also basic writing and reading skills in order to find a job in France. The book is visually pleasant, colorful, and with a large font showing the three scripts learners need to master: uppercase, lowercase, and cursive. Unlike most LSP textbooks, Au boulot 1 is not divided in chapters built around a common theme, even though all the objectives of the exercises and tasks are centered around social and professional life. The first 30 pages are devoted to five introductory themes of varying lengths: read and write the alphabet and fill in forms with a personal profile; find and learn vocabulary related to some jobs; write and read addresses on envelopes; and compose messages in professional situations. The rest of the book is dedicated to the study of 30 graphemes, with activities based on the communicative and action-oriented approaches. Each grapheme includes reading, writing, speaking, and listening activities. Additional exercises are available online and a second book is planned for more graphemes. The purpose of the book, inasmuch as it aims at developing literacy skills for migrant adults, is worthwhile. However, in the introduction, the author includes two more profiles as the book's target audience: the usual French as a Foreign Language learners at the A1/A2 level here, and native French speakers with literacy difficulties. The range of learners explains the somewhat unusual format of the book and represents its major weakness. For a regular A1/A2 French as a Foreign Language target audience, the book may serve as a supplement for vocabulary exercises to a more general textbook, since intercultural competence, an afterthought in the introduction, is left to the discretion of the teacher. This is potentially problematic for such learners, as they are not necessarily in France. Moreover, most of the vocabulary dealing with the workplace, except for the list of jobs, is not required at the A1/A2 level for exams like the DELF, which such learners may be interested in taking. For a native audience with literacy difficulties, the reading and writing activities on the professional world are relevant, but the speaking and [End Page 295] listening ones are less useful, since the vocabulary would be known. This book seems most relevant for the near-illiterate migrant learners described in the introduction as the first target audience. Clotilde Landais Purdue University (IN) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Efectos conjuntos del contacto imaginado y la similitud con el protagonista de mensajes testimoniales a través de la identificación y el transporte narrativo

Mediante dos experimentos realizados en España y Países Bajos se contrastaron los efectos conjuntos del contacto imaginado y la similitud con el protagonista de mensajes narrativos en las actitudes e intención de conducta hacia inmigrantes estigmatizados. Avanzamos el concepto condición de recepción óptima: imaginar una interacción positiva con un inmigrante antes de leer un mensaje testimonial de un inmigrante que se presenta como similar a la audiencia. La condición de recepción óptima indujo mayor identificación y transporte que la condición de referencia, lo que llevó a actitudes más positivas y una mayor intención de contacto intergrupal. Los hallazgos se discuten en el contexto de la investigación sobre persuasión narrativa y reducción del prejuicio

Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue: Native American Boarding School Stories

1 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue Native American Boarding School Stories Welcome to JAIE’s first issue of the 2018 volume year, a special issue on the history and legacies of the boarding and residential schools developed in the United States and Canada to allegedly “civilize” Indigenous peoples. The special issue was developed in concert with the planning for an exhibit, Away From Home: American­ Indian Boarding School Stories, planned to open at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, in early 2019. Inception of the Heard exhibit dates to the late 1990s, with planning for an exhibit titled Remembering Our Indian School Days, which opened in 2000. Originally envisioned as a five-­ year installation, what quickly became known as “the boarding school exhibit” attracted a degree of public interest and engagement by Native and non-­ Native audiences that kept it open year after year. In 2015, Heard staff began to plan an updated, refreshed, and renewed boarding school exhibit. That story is told in the article in this special issue titled “Remembering Our Indian School Days: A Landmark Exhibit at the Heard Museum.” Before we dive into the stories of boarding schools, it is important to note that this special issue and the Heard exhibits to which it is linked primarily focus on boarding schools and Native communities in the United States. The history and legacies of Canadian residential schools that enrolled First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples are intimately linked with U.S. federal and mission boarding schools, but also have had their own distinctive trajectory. Most notably, Canada in the past few decades has grappled publicly with the serious abuses documented in the residential school system through litigation in the courts, a massive court-­ ordered settlement, and the work of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). More information and an extensive set of reports on the work and findings of the NCTR can be found at http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=905. Scholarship in this issue, particularly Jon Reyhner’s overview in “American Indian Boarding Schools: What Went Wrong? What Is Going Right?” includes references to the Canadian context, but an in-­ depth comparison 2 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 of the educational systems and Indigenous experiences in the two settler nations is beyond our scope and demands further attention.1 Native experiences and histories are rooted in place—­ including the places we know as boarding schools. We turn now to discuss the place we—­ the Heard Museum and Arizona State University, home to the Center for Indian Education and the Journal of American Indian Education—­ share in Phoenix, the Valley of the Sun. The City of Phoenix Is a Native Place In the early 20th century, Phoenix was a small southwestern town established in a valley that had been home to Native peoples for millennia . The low desert valley was watered by the Gila and Salt Rivers, which enabled a flourishing agricultural economy for centuries before Spanish , and later U.S. settlers arrived. The ancient peoples known to us today as the Hohokam, or Huhugam, engineered miles of canals crisscrossing the valley floor, irrigating “between 65,000 and 250,000 acres in the Salt River Valley alone” and supporting dozens of villages (Sheridan , 1995, p. 12). Spanish colonial expansion impacted the Native peoples who farmed the valley in the centuries after the Hohokam, but new crops, especially winter wheat and barley, bolstered agricultural and trade opportunities. By the 1840s, Native nations including the Akimel O’odham (also known as Pima) and Pee-­ Posh / Xalychidom Piipaash (Maricopa) were supplying U.S. military garrisons and settlers with thousands of bushels of wheat every year, and their produce sustained gold rushers flocking to California (DeJong, 2005).2...

The Language of Moderate Salafism in Eastern Tatarstan

ABSTRACTAfter the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian became the main linguistic vehicle of Islam in Russia. Muslims who still speak in their native languages (such as Tatar, Chechen and Daghestani) now have to face and compete with the powerful growth of ‘Islamic Russian’, a new sociolect of the Russian language, which is characterized by the integration of Islamic terminology, either in loanwords or with Russian substitutes. This article argues that differences in ideology do not predetermine the choice of the linguistic vehicles: a group of Salafis in Tatarstan – so far ignored in scholarship but very active in publishing – employs the Tatar language for its moderate fundamentalist rhetoric to a native audience, and translates its texts into Russian only as a second step, to reach an audience beyond the republic of Tatarstan. While it is usually taken for granted that Salafi ideology comes with an international appeal, these Tatar Salafis’ adherence to the native tongue can be explained by the national movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Translation, transformation and genre in the Kristapurana

Thomas Stephens, in his Kristapurana (1616), attempted to negotiate the intercultural spaces between Christianity and Hinduism through the creative processes of translation. In this study, we take his translation of the term Vaicunttha as a place/space defining these intercultural encounters. Vaicunttha is a place in Indian mythology where the Hindu God Vishnu resides. Stephens translates “heaven” as Vaicunttha, while Christ is depicted as Vaicunttha-swami (Lord of Vaicunttha). Stephens’ translation of words such as Vaicunttha makes it clear that he had studied the hierarchical structure of the “Hindu heavens” well enough to place Christ in Vaicunttha, the highest abode of Vishnu, rather than in any lower tier of the heavens. It intrigues the reader as to why Stephens would place Christ in Vaicunttha instead of suarga (heaven). This metaphoric image of Christ within the sanctuary of a Hindu temple evokes anxiety in the native audience of experiencing a “foreign” message entering into a genre sacred to them. The present study foregrounds one “microcosm” of Christianity in Goa in seventeenth-century India.

Why the World Will Never Be Tobacco-Free: Reframing "Tobacco Control" Into a Traditional Tobacco Movement.

As successes mount in reducing commercial tobacco use, an alarming disparity has taken shape in Minnesota. Recent studies revealed that overall smoking rates have dropped to 14%, whereas American Indians' rates remain higher than 50%. With support from ClearWay Minnesota, the organization created from the state's tobacco settlement, advocates working within sovereign tribal governments to create smoke-free policies came together to discuss effective strategies within tribal Nations. We discussed the history behind mainstream tobacco control's failure to resonate with Native audiences and the need to reframe the movement to a goal of restoring traditional tobacco practices. We share our insights on this critical area for achieving health equity and provide recommendations for tribes, non-Indian advocates, and funders, with a plea for tribal inclusion in commercial tobacco "end-game" strategies.

Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature by Rebecca L. Walkowitz

wondering what’s next while leading them to perceptive and important conclusions: imagination owes a great deal to physical exertion; and the best players are not necessarily the most skilled but instead those who improve their teammates’ performance. God Is Round is not only an indispensable companion to international soccer but also a fine introduction of US readers to an awardwinning Mexican author whose talent and skill demand that more of his work—novels , short stories, essays, and chronicles—be translated into English. (Editorial note: To read Ryan Long’s interview with Villoro, check out the January 2011 issue of WLT.) Ryan Long University of Maryland Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York. Columbia University Press. 2015. 322 pages. Constantly aware of her semantically loaded and ambitious title, Rebecca L. Walkowitz rightly focuses her epilogue on the mutability of “translated,” having taken her readers on a decisive journey through a state-of-the-art critical and theoretical minefield. Her five chapters, each truly novel in terms of revising extant scholarship , weave a double helix: (1) world literature and its theory, presently understood, as a limit to heterogeneity; and (2) the avatars of belonging, circulation, and location of culture, readership, and reading. Nevertheless, corrective measures are knotty because they work in isolation and get trickier when they bump up against one another, particularly when novels in many languages translated into English are in play. Thus, limiting The Savage Detectives , Bolaño’s entry into “world literature,” to the semiotics of an illustrated poem flouts numerous cultural issues, among them the lack of difference in the literary Spanish of authors like Vila-Matas or Latin American novelists widely read in Spain. Along with Walkowitz’s admirable job on Pamuk’s untranslated novels and on the geography of Ishiguro’s novels and their versions/book covers in other languages, it would have been equally productive to problematize Ishiguro’s reception if he had published “English novels ” in the Japanese he doesn’t write. In linguistic terms and concerning her great emphasis on expressivity, physical production, and how reception contributes to imagining communities, Walkowitz is convincing regarding Junot Díaz’s punning, as a corrective to Adam Thirlwell’s vague and unconvincing “multiple” translation enterprises. Two unexplored aspects that complement Walkowitz’s timely study are how English-language novels written by US Latinos fare when they are translated into a Spanish that is habitually awkward to a native audience and what actual fluency critics need in foreign languages to discern cultural differences more precisely, the “untranslatability” other critics espouse. Some of Walkowitz’s proposals could function irregularly, including “comparison ” (and its corollary, “comparison novels ”) instead of comparative literature, or why some authors leave words untranslated (in Coetzee, whose works merit her best readings). Some suggestions—like “what literature is now has to alter what world literature is now” and what “unimaginable largeness” allows us to consider— have slight applicability. Cultural mobility and imminent digitally translated novels (which will not parse the creativity, inflections , local dialects, or cultural nuances learned by studying foreign languages) will be too complex to extrapolate how Walkowitz’s corpus elucidates the “born translated” notion; but this is an excellent proposition for literary history. (Editorial note: To read an essay by Rebecca L. Walkowitz, turn to page 26.) Will H. Corral San Francisco World English Poetry Ed. Sudeep Sen Bengal Publications In this broad, sweeping collection, Sudeep Sen brings together poets from around the world in an attempt to create recognition for underrepresented voices. The first poet of the book is Abeer Hoque, a Nigerian-born Bangladeshi American writer, and the last, William Radice, an English poet who teaches Bengali, exhibiting the contemporary state of English poetry that no longer belongs to one or two nations but to the world. Ellen Wiles Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts Columbia University Press The transitioning political and cultural climate of Myanmar involves the relaxation of the country’s fiftyyear system of strict censorship and repression of thought. Ellen Wiles discusses the secret literary culture that developed under this regime and more recent developments by interviewing prominent writers and providing translations of their intriguing works for...

Exploring the translation of animated films

The visibility of language variation in films has become a challenge to translation for dubbing, and the need arises to understand how the process of translating variation can influence the product in significant ways. By carrying out a quantitative study, we answered questions such as whether the practice is acceptable amongst audiences, or whether some language choices alter the perception of certain characters. We measured the perception of ten opposed personality traits amongst native audiences in English, Spanish and Catalan using a Semantic Differential Scale, and assessed the global impression of characters that had been translated with and without the use of varieties. The results show that characters overall are perceived the same way across languages regardless of whether they use varieties in or outside the mainstream, and conclude that this tool can be used to quantify and compare the same characters across languages.

Portuges, Catherine and Hames, Peter (eds). Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 (review)

REVIEWS 763 by avant-garde camera operators during the 1920s. Cavendish is particularly attentive to the cameraman’s lighting choices. He points out, for example, that the intense ‘natural’ beauty of the apples in Dovzhenko’s Earth was the product of Demuts´kyi’s skill with artificial lights, mirrors, and the monocle (single-element soft-focus) lens (p. 274), while Tisse’s use in The General Line of ‘core lighting’ (‘sources striking the face from the sides and slightly from the rear’) was intended to add drama and ‘an impression of naturalism’ to the faces of the untrained actors the practice of typage had brought onto the set (p. 109). Seeking to soften the focus of his portrait shots, Golovnia placed a thin layer of gauze over the lens at times in Mat´ (p. 149). Anybody who teaches early Soviet film will want to consult Cavendish’s detailed, technical descriptions of the devices employed by particular cameramen for particular films. Indeed, attentive description is Cavendish’s forte, and for the most part he avoids interpretation, almost as if answering Susan Sontag’s plea in Against Interpretation for ‘essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it’ (New York, 1966). As a final note, there are forty-seven small illustrations included between the Conclusion and the Filmography, but with a book of this kind, which pays such close attention to visual details, many more illustrations would have been very welcome and helpful. Without images to which a reader can refer, some of Cavendish’s descriptions and comparisons fall flat (through no fault of their own). We are given no frames at all, for example, from Evreiskoe schast´e, which means that Cavendish’s comparison of Tisse’s work on this film to his work on Bronenosets Potemkin (a comparison made tempting by the use in both films of the Odessa Steps) is particularly hard to follow. It would have been lovely, though undoubtedly expensive, to have the illustrations embedded, with helpful captions, in the text, to help the reader understand the different ‘signatures’ of these masterful and creative cameramen, finally given the attention they deserve in this excellent and inspiring book. Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Anne Nesbet Department of Film and Media University of California, Berkeley Portuges, Catherine and Hames, Peter (eds). Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2013. viii + 279 pp. Notes. Index. $94.50. Beginning with Wajda’s trailblazing war trilogy, East and Central European cinema enjoyed a relative international vogue through the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, distinguished by formal audacity, subtle symbolism and political critique. SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 764 Catherine Portuges and Peter Hames’s new collection, Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, explores what happened once that international spotlight dimmed on the region’s cinema — an era ironically coinciding with renewed openness and reintegration with the West. This thorough investigation of institutional and artistic changes reveals that the dismantling of the Communist system has often presented filmmakers with hindrances as grave as the ‘repressive’ apparatus of old, and that globalization and economic ‘freedom’ have brought threats of cultural uniformity. Yet the potential pessimism is offset by a sense of the resilient vitality of the cinemas and film cultures described. As one contributor puts it here, locally made movies ‘still matter’ to their native audiences, even if filmmakers no longer enjoy ‘demigod’ status and no longer address viewers with the imperious highart authority of the past. Eight chapters cover eight different cinematic contexts, each written by an appropriate scholarly expert (Portuges and Hames themselves cover Hungarian and Czech and Slovak cinema respectively). Half of these contexts do not exist in the same national configuration as they did before 1989, and if the inclusion of a reunified East Germany may seem contentious, Barton Byg’s chapter not only takes as its central question the continued existence of ‘East German cinema’ but convincingly detects a dark, interrogative and reflexive — if not always geographically grounded — residue of the ‘East’ in contemporary German film. Shared characteristics are evident between the contexts explored. Clearly the transition to capitalism has been plagued by...

Schooling the gaze: Industry and nation-building in Luxembourgish landscape-writing, 1900–1940

This paper investigates the role of industry in the invention of a national landscape in Luxembourg between 1900 and 1940. Luxembourg is a significant case study when it comes to the construction of national identity, because it did not gain its independence (1890) through revolution but was attributed the status of nationhood by the decision of the major European political powers. The period under investigation is also characterized by immense industrial expansion: in the course of a few decades, Luxembourg moved from being a rural state to being a major economic power. Focusing on landscape-writing addressed to a native audience, this paper examines the nexus of the economy, the arts and politics, arguing that writers integrated representations of industrial processes into the discourse of national identity in order to assert Luxembourg’s competence and ‘right to life’.

Multicultural Media Outreach: Increasing Cancer Information Coverage in Minority Communities

Ethnic media can serve as an opportunity for cancer education and outreach to minority communities. The National Cancer Institute developed the Multicultural Media Outreach (MMO) program which utilizes an integrated approach of both traditional and social media to disseminate evidence-based cancer education information for minority communities. The MMO program is the contact point for multicultural media outlets seeking evidence-based cancer information, education materials, minority spokespersons, and news tailored to minority communities affected by cancer health disparities. MMO developed Lifelines®, a cancer education series that addresses cancer prevention, treatment, survivorship, clinical trials, and other cancer-related topics for African American, Hispanic, Asian American, American Indian, and Alaska Native audiences. Lifelines® content is disseminated through traditional media (radio, print, and television) as well as social media (web, Twitter, YouTube, and RSS feed). This article describes the MMO program and lessons learned to date.

Singapore's ‘Cinema-Age’ of the 1930s: Hollywood and the shaping of Singapore modernity

Cinema-going was the most popular form of entertainment in 1930s' Singapore, with an estimated 8000 viewers filling 20 screens each night in the city by 1936. About 70% of films screened were American and many large Hollywood studios had distribution offices in Singapore. A entire supporting field consumption shaped by film fandom culture emerged, from film magazines to sales in gramophone records and wireless broadcasting of popular soundtracks and live performances in dance halls at entertainment parks, called the ‘Worlds’—such as Great World and Happy World. There were diverse reactions to this social phenomenon from different quarters. The colonial government was alarmed at the perceived influence of decadent Hollywood films on a native audience in terms of moral vices and crime. Religious bodies and older members of the local non-European community were brought in to sit on the Cinematograph Films Censorship Annual Committee. Drawing from the Anglophone print media, this paper aims to document local audiences' voices in the highly-debated topic of censorship. The existence of a large corpus of English-language publications produced in inter-war Singapore for a local, non-European audience is testimony to the depth of the domestic, English-language public sphere, which cut across diverse ethnic backgrounds and was based upon a common framework of English-language education and cultural references. This paper will argue that America films played a crucial role in influencing social changes in Singapore, particularly amongst young people and women, as well as in shaping the identity of Singapore as a distinctly modern city.

The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (review)

Reviewed by: The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England Birgit Brander Rasmussen (bio) The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England. Matt Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 237 pp. The 1995 publication of Walter Mignolo’s book The Darker Side of the Renaissance was a landmark moment in early American studies and its influence is strongly felt in Matt Cohen’s new book The Networked Wilderness. Mignolo’s call for a wider archive and attention to the traffic between European and indigenous American systems of signification is here brought to bear on colonial New England. Cohen proposes to understand this region and time as a dense network of communications systems that connect Native and settler communities. The term “communication systems” signals Cohen’s efforts to move beyond alphabetic literacy and the print sphere, and to take account of the diverse forms and methods that organized communication in the polyglot world of seventeenth-century New England. Cohen’s archive is radically diverse: printed texts, performances, machines, poles, books, maps, museums, and medical practices. Although we are in the familiar realm of New England, and revisit familiar texts, Matt Cohen’s networked wilderness is definitely not Perry Miller’s New England. Efforts to control flows of information within New England and across the Atlantic are central to the way in which Cohen understands the cultural and literary history of the region. He rejects the binary distinction between oral and print culture in favor of a fluid continuum. Through a series of innovative case studies, Cohen offers new models for how to recognize and read some of the signification practices that organize communication in the region. He is particularly interested in writers who evince an interest [End Page 409] in and understanding of the intersection between Native and settler modes of signification. The first chapter focuses on Thomas Morton’s famous maypole at Ma-re Mount Plantation. Cohen challenges historical consensus that Morton vexed Puritan leaders because of his interference with Plymouth’s fur trade. Instead, Cohen argues, the real issue was communication, reading practices, and control over the public sphere. In Cohen’s reading, Morton challenged structures of authority that relied on control over modes of information embodied by print, literacy, and publication. For Cohen, the maypole functioned as a “publishing venue” that competed with Pilgrim leaders’ control over communication in the English settler community (33). Predating the arrival of the first printing press in Cambridge by fourteen years, Morton’s maypole can then be seen as a “tool for distributing information publicly” that challenged the theocracy’s control over oral and written communication while also opening up an alternative site of authority for written and spoken words (33). Because Morton directed what Cohen calls his “publication event” at English, Dutch, and Native audiences, Cohen attempts to trace the reception of Morton’s maypole performance and his publication of New English Canaan by audiences in England, Holland, and the eastern woodlands of North America. This effort reflects Cohen’s desire to “break down the separation of indigenous studies from the history of the book” (25). Here, Cohen’s work dovetails with equally current scholarship by Phillip Round—acknowledged as an important source along with Mignolo—that attempts to bring Native American studies and book history into dialogue. I would have liked to see Cohen push the definition of books a bit further to consider those types of books that were indigenous to the region, like birch bark scrolls. The practice of carving pictographic announcements on trees would, it seems, fit nicely within Cohen’s consideration of poles and publication, and Gordon Sayre has suggested how one might proceed methodologically. Instead, Cohen focuses on reconstructing the materiality of public performances in order to trace the ways in which individual “publication events” were organized by the communication systems they sought to activate (21). Cohen methodologically links Sandra Gustafson’s attention to performance with the insights of systems theory, informed by a Foucaultian sense of the nodal and contingent nature of power in the context of information technology. [End Page 410] This effort is strong when Cohen reads the maypole and New English Canaan in relation to settler contests over authority and...

Speaking Sovereignty and Communicating Change: Rhetorical Sovereignty and the Inaugural Exhibits at the NMAI

Speaking Sovereignty and Communicating Change:Rhetorical Sovereignty and the Inaugural Exhibits at the NMAI Lisa King (bio) The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has attracted a great deal of attention from museum visitors and scholars alike since its opening in 2004, and with that attention has come a multitude of critiques. From the initial reviewers from major newspapers who criticized the museum for its perceived lack of scholarship and structure, to Native critics who worried that the exhibits lacked enough (or the most appropriate) historical context, from reviewers who praised the example set by the NMAI in its collaborative model, to Native visitors who found a great deal of satisfaction in seeing their stories told, reactions to the NMAI have run the gamut.1 What is generally recognized among scholars is that the NMAI provides a unique model for museum practice and that never before has the Smithsonian been willing to collaborate on this scale with Native peoples. As such, the NMAI offers one of the most public platforms for Native peoples to address an audience of non-Native visitors. Using Beverly Singer's term "cultural sovereignty," Amanda J. Cobb asserts the extraordinary Native influence on the site, in that "every aspect of the museum, including its very purpose and function, had to be filtered through Native core cultural values and adapted accordingly. . . . [In] the case of the NMAI, that means integrating the old ways and core cultural values and traditions into the very concept of what a museum is and can be."2 The recognition of cultural sovereignty is arguably one of the main functions, if not the primary function, of the NMAI. However, the act of communicating cultural sovereignty in a museum involves more than simply asserting it. The NMAI is situated in the heart of the US capital and the Smithsonian Institution, and, given [End Page 75] this location, it must simultaneously navigate the diverse audiences that visit and the influence of the "museum" as an institutionalized communicative structure. Tribally owned and operated museums and cultural centers are able to fully prioritize their Native audiences in whatever way the local tribal community sees fit; conversely, the NMAI is largely obligated to reflect the Smithsonian's values and work with the majority non-Native audience. The NMAI is thus a balancing act that works in a weighted framework between asserting the sovereignty of the Native audiences and saying something so foreign that a non-Native audience does not understand. Rhetoricians generally acknowledge the advantage of identifying with one's audience to build one's ethos, but Ernest Stromberg points out that the particular issue for Native peoples using identification as a rhetorical tool is "to bridge communication divisions while maintaining an insistence of difference."3 Likewise, even the communicative framework itself can pose a problem. As Simon Ortiz has said of the English language in general, Native users of adapted colonial languages must always consciously work to avoid accidentally speaking what they do not mean through a language that carries colonial baggage.4 I would argue that the same applies to the communication that takes place within museums. The great advantage to adapting museum structures to Native uses is that those structures are a far-reaching communicative venue with a wide audience; yet the problem with the same is that the museum communicative structure and its audiences already have expectations of Native peoples and what museum exhibits should say. I argue in this article that if the NMAI wishes to make a communicable assertion of cultural sovereignty that avoids speaking something not intended to its audiences, then the very act of communication—the rhetorical frame itself—must be examined. This is not to argue for pandering to non-Native audiences; as Cobb writes, "To do so would be tantamount to calling the entire project—a project so significant to cultural sovereignty and continuance—a failure."5 But in order to learn from, refine, and strengthen this highly rhetorical and sovereign endeavor, the NMAI bears reexamination in those terms. With this in mind, I use Scott Richard Lyons's sense of "rhetorical sovereignty" to analyze the NMAI's three inaugural exhibits in order to reveal in sharper...