Native Place Research Articles

Toddlers’ Processing of Phonological Alternations: Early Compensation for Assimilation in English and French

Using a picture pointing task, this study examines toddlers' processing of phonological alternations that trigger sound changes in connected speech. Three experiments investigate whether 2;5- to 3-year-old children take into account assimilations--processes by which phonological features of one sound spread to adjacent sounds--for the purpose of word recognition (e.g., in English, ten pounds can be produced as te[mp]ounds). English toddlers (n = 18) show sensitivity to native place assimilations during lexical access in Experiment 1. Likewise, French toddlers (n = 27) compensate for French voicing assimilations in Experiment 2. However, French toddlers (n = 27) do not take into account a hypothetical non-native place assimilation rule in Experiment 3, suggesting that compensation for assimilation is already language specific.

The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said Karni Pal Bhati McCarthy, Conor. 2010. The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $79.00hc. $19.99 sc. $16.00 e-book. i–ix +158 pp. Conor McCarthy presents a lucid and highly readable overview of the oeuvre of one of the major intellectuals of our time. For readers who think of Edward Said primarily as a postcolonial critic whose chief work was Orientalism, this introduction should prove to be a compelling corrective that shows the eclectic trajectory not only of Said himself, but also of the field of postcolonial theory. Chapter one provides a helpful overview of Said’s life and work that goes on to explore their imbrication, while chapter two offers an excellent account of intellectual influences on Said. Chapter three discusses five of Said’s key works: Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975); Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979); The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983); and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Finally, chapter four sketches out the “crucial and representative reactions” to Said’s work (123). The opening chapters seek to explain why Said was not just “the most widely known intellectual in the world” (1) at the time of his death, but also one whose “reputation and work polarized and polarizes opinion” (3). Within the academy, McCarthy notes, Said “was controversial because his work crossed disciplinary boundaries,” and outside it, “because [he] was active in the cause of Palestine” (3). [End Page 139] The study lists phenomenology (represented chiefly by the critics of consciousness, or the Geneva School), philology (Giambattista Vico and Eric Auerbach), Marxism (Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, and Raymond Williams), and poststructuralism (chiefly Michel Foucault) among the “various intellectual currents and traditions” that contributed to the catholicity of Said’s oeuvre (13). McCarthy argues that what some of his detractors saw as Said’s “interfering . . . in areas outside . . . his professional expertise” was in fact a “kind of methodological principle” (3). By pursuing the project of “bringing disparate knowledges and epistemologies into unexpected conjunction,” Said’s writing was “concerned . . . not only with the production of knowledge, but with the conditions of possibility of the production of knowledge” (3, 13, emphasis original). In discussing these diverse strands of thought, McCarthy provides a succinct overview of the key ideas in each field as applicable to an understanding of the development of Said’s own work. So, we learn that Said’s early interest in phenomenology is carried further not only in his second book, Beginnings, with its sustained meditation on intention, but also in The World, the Text, and the Critic, with its insistence, for instance, on the “worldly self-situating” act of T.S. Eliot’s well-known essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (20). While the influence of philology could be seen as an indirect one, emerging out of Said’s training in comparative literature and intersecting with the influence of phenomenology and other abiding themes in his work, Said learned from Auerbach, a German Jewish intellectual exiled in Turkey, about the “relationship between distance, exile, and alienation, on the one hand, and profound knowledge, on the other” (22). This insight becomes axiomatic in later work as the form of an exemplary relationship of distance necessary to criticism. “The dialectic between distance and closeness, home and exile, rootedness and alienation,” the subject of recurrent rumination by Said, is rearticulated, McCarthy reminds us, in Culture and Imperialism: “exile is not a matter of utter disconnection from a home or culture; rather it is a matter of proximity to a native place of which one is fully aware but to which one may not return” (23). Said learned much from several Marxist thinkers without ever being a fully committed Marxist. He assimilated many of Lukács’s insights about the novel form—“as the genre of alienation, disillusionment, and ‘transcendental homelessness’”—to his own idea of criticism: as an “anti-dynastic,” “non-linear [and] decentred process” that is “modern and modernist” in its being “homeless in the world of language and writing, restless, perpetually reinventing itself, . . . perpetually re-examining and reinstating its own conditions of possibility” (30). More...

The Politics of Place Making in Shenzhen, China

This paper examines the politics of place making in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, pan of an emerging network of production centers in South China. Rapidly developed from a border town to a major city through transnational linkages of capital and kinship, the zone is a desired destination for migrant youth from all over China searching for work and experiences in the city. Temporary workers make up 66 percent of the Shenzhen population, yet many lack the proper skills and cultural •capital• to compete in the transitional economy. Authorities ' attempts to forge a collective sense of place among its diverse immigrant groups have been largely unsuccessful, as Shenzhen is n o t one but many places shaped by differences of class, native place, and household registration status.

Effect of Migration on Agricultural Productivity and Women Empowerment in Bihar

Migration of population has been a recurrent phenomenon since the dawn of human history. Though its form has changed but remains as very dominant phenomenon in the global social system. In modern days also people migrate from underdeveloped areas to the developed ones in search of better employment and opportunity. There are far reaching consequences of migration of male labor force on their place of origin. Keeping in view the anticipated consequences of migration in place of origin, this study has been undertaken to examine the impact of male labor out-migration on rice productivity, livelihood and women empowerment on migrant household in Bihar.The empirical analysis is based on a survey of 400 households (200 migrants and 200 non-migrants) from eight villages in Madhubani and East Champaran districts of Bihar. Migrant households and matching sample of non-migrant households were selected to undertake a comparative analysis of differences in agricultural productivity parameters and women empowerment level. It was observed that the efficiencies of human labor and irrigation in rice production were higher than non-migrant households and statistically significant, indicating rational use of these two critical inputs on migrant households in Bihar. This observation leads to the conclusion that the migration might have helped in judicious use of human labor at native place due to migration of surplus labor force for gainful employment to destination of migration. Remittances have been utilized for meeting consumption needs, improved livelihood, better education to children and better health care facilities which help in overall improvement in livelihood on migrant households in Bihar. Migrant households also preferred to save money to meet their requirements in unforeseen situations. Hence, migration can be said to be one of risk-coping strategies for the weaker sections of the society and helped developing the saving habits among migrant households. The allocation of remittances on agricultural inputs could have increased if proper infrastructure facilities were present in rural areas for faster dissemination of modern agricultural technology for increasing agricultural production. Level of women employment has increased on migrant households, particularly on poor households; however, work load of women has also increased. It has been observed that role of women of migrant households changed from unpaid female labor to managers of the household, however, they face problem in management of fund, technology and input-output marketing. There is a need to launch a programme for their training to improve their knowledge in financial, technological and marketing management.

On uneven ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the making of place in modern Japan

The history of literary and artistic production in modern Japan has typically centered on the literature and art of Tokyo, yet cultural activity in the country's regional cities and rural towns was no less vibrant. On Uneven Ground recovers pieces of this neglected history through the figure of Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933). While alive, he remained a mostly unknown and unread provincial author whose experiments with narrative fiction, amateur theater, and farmer's art reveal an intense determination to reimagine and remake his native place, in the northeast of Japan, meaningful. Today, Miyazawa is one of the most recognized figures in Japan's modern literary canon. The story of his radical posthumous rise presents an opportunity to examine the larger history of how writing and other forms of artistic practice have intersected with place-based identity and the uneven geography of cultural production. The first book-length study of Miyazawa in English, On Uneven Ground centers on Miyazawa's life and writing to recreate a sense of what it was to write about and remake place from a spatially marginal position in the cultural field.

They Suffer in Silence

ABSTRACTAll India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, receives patients from all over India. This narrative describes the suffering of cancer patients who are unable to access pain relief and palliative care at their native places and have to repeatedly travel long distances to get morphine—all because of lack of awareness and availability of palliative care in North India, and the restrictions on availability of morphine due to stringent, outdated narcotic regulations.

Commentary: Property and propriety: (re)making the space of indigeneity in Australian cities

This commentary reflects on the ways in which identity-bound studies reflecting on indigeneity and the city rarely connect with the theories that drive world systems and post-world systems accounts of urbanization. It ponders how we might begin to make links between a default ‘local’ episteme of Australian indigenous studies and a ‘more worldly’ episteme that operates as the infrastructure for understanding (global) urbanization. First, it points to how Australian cities are in an ongoing process of settlement/unsettlement, cycles of creative destruction that implicate indigenous interests (old and new) in various ways. Second, it points to the place of Aborigines within a wider intensification of urban social polarization. Third, it points to the place of Australian cities in an age of migration such that the outlines of differentiation associated with Australia's inaugural settler–indigene distinction must nowadays negotiate cities in which there is evident super-diversity.

Indigeneity and the intercultural city

The historical erasure of Aboriginality from the settler city has now been well documented by Australian postcolonial scholarship. The increasing cultural diversity of cities such as Sydney, however, pushes Aboriginal claims to place beyond the now familiar settler/Aboriginal dichotomy and into a more culturally complex context. Through an empirical case study of Aboriginal participation in urban planning on Sydney's western fringe this article examines Aboriginal place in the intercultural city. Drawing on scholarship on interculturalism, Aboriginal participation in Sydney's urban planning is examined through the dual rights criteria: the right to difference and the right to the city. In addition, the research data also served to build on this criteria, gesturing towards a potential third condition for an intercultural city: the identification of issues such as urban sustainability that create common ground, connecting the city's diverse population. Rather than a return to a homogenizing ‘common good’, this article argues that the adoption of a more intercultural ethos in urban planning requires a re-visioning of the city from an exclusionary colonial urbanism to an amalgamation of diverse ways of life and land use that together will sustain its population into the future.

郷土 Kyōdo /Native Soil

郷土 Kyōdo/Native Soil Satō Kenji (bio) Translated by Jordan Sand (bio) Kyōdo kenkyū (郷土研究、kyōdo studies) formed an important element in the composition of the neologism kyōdo (literally, “native soil”) in the 1910s. From there, the idea went on to penetrate the thinking of early Japanese minzokugaku (ethnology or folklore studies). In retrospect, the potential of this term lay in the way it contained two overlapping meanings, indicating not only the field that was the object of research but also the world of everyday life that configured the researching subject’s conscious sensibility. However, in the 1930s, when local folklore collection under the rubric of kyōdo kenkyū became the pedagogical fashion inside and outside of official circles, as kyōdo became an object of social interest, its range of meaning also inflated confusedly. One important source for the development of the word is the lecture “Kyōdo Studies and Kyōdo Education” (Kyōdo kenkyū to kyōdo kyōiku), which Yanagita Kunio delivered in Yamagata in November 1932. In this lecture, the thinker who would come to be spoken of as the founder of Japanese minzokugaku directed two criticisms at contemporary trends of practice in what was then known as kyōdo education. His first point was that kyōdo was a methodological concept rather than merely a geographical term, which meant one could not substitute for it the name of one’s hometown or of a specific existing region. For minzokugaku as a new historiography that took its materials from popularly transmitted stories, kyōdo was not a space that could be delineated by lines on a map. This assertion of Yanagita’s was greatly at variance with the concept of kyōdo being promoted in human geography and pedagogy at the time. In the same sense as language, kyōdo for Yanagita was a category that operated within the internal patterns of thought of individuals who inhabited it as a space. Below, I will reread kyōdo’s historical interest and contemporary potential on the basis of this interpretation of Yanagita’s. [End Page 78] Yanagita’s second point concerned the tendency to confine the connotations of the new term to knowledge and information that was “unique” to a particular locale. Put simply, his target here was the kind of parochial focus on one’s own culture evidenced in “local pride” campaigns. Yanagita’s criticism thus dictated a comparative approach to folklore research. Yet the comparative method was no panacea. Naïve comparisons relying on dichotomous schemas can manufacture claims of local particularity that actually cloud observation rather than aiding it. Since Edward Said’s Orientalism, it has become plain that how we frame cultural comparison is always a matter of strategy that must be engaged in consciously and with care. Yanagita’s call for comparisons thus presents another reason to straighten out what sort of work is done by the word kyōdo. Kyōdo Is Neither a Place Nor an Affiliation Yanagita’s first point is known through the following famous and frequently quoted statement: We were not taking kyōdo as our object of research. In contrast to this, many of you speak of studying the kyōdo. …We weren’t trying to study the kyōdo, we were trying to study something in/with the kyōdo (kyōdo de]). This something was the life of the Japanese, particularly the past record of this people (minzoku) as a group. Our plan was to seek to learn this anew in each kyōdo, or through the sensibilities of the kyōdo people (kyōdojin no ishiki kankaku o tōshite) (14:145). How should we interpret the phrase he stresses here, kyōdo de? Here is one fork in the road of interpretation. In the simplest reading, Yanagita’s remarks have been taken to emphasize the importance of research by folklore collectors in their own native places “in the provinces,” and his encouragement of this practice. The phrase was read, in other words, as an indication of the place where research should be conducted and, by extension, of qualifications for who could engage in that research. A suggestion of privilege...

Native Place, Environment, and the Trade Fort Concentration on the South Platte River, 1835–45

This article analyzes the unusual trading post concentration—Fort Vasquez, Fort Jackson, Fort Lupton, and Fort St. Vrain—that operated simultaneously along the South Platte River during the late 1830s. These trading posts, or forts, dealt almost exclusively in bison robes provided by Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho hunters. The reasons behind this trading locus, which was unique to the fur trade era of the western Great Plains, are examined in the context of indigenous instrumentality and ecological factors. Heretofore unexamined environmental and archaeological data combined with historical research into intertribal conflict and place provide a more holistic explanation for this unique conjuncture.

The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion by Yucheng Qin (review)

Reviewed by: The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion by Yucheng Qin Daniel Meissner (bio) Yucheng Qin. The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. x, 224 pp. Hardcover $51.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3274-2. The Six Companies, according to Yucheng Qin, played a far more influential role in protecting Chinese immigrant rights in the United States and in shaping late Qing diplomacy and nationalism than scholars have previously realized. This study attempts to rectify that oversight by examining the Six Companies from the perspective of a traditional huiguan (native place association), a transnational labor facilitator (not broker), a quasi-official governmental institution, a pioneering nationalist organization, and a model for Qing diplomatic missions. As if this were not an ambitious enough project, Qin also takes to task Joseph Levenson’s assertion of late Qing evolution from culturalism to nationalism, arguing that nongovernmental agents such as huiguan were instrumental in transitioning native place identity to nationalism. Qin begins by defending the Six Companies against a prevalent mid-nineteenth-century (and still generally accepted) accusation that the organization served as a conduit for importing indentured coolie labor. In chapter 1, he presents a brief historical view of international trading networks linking Guangdong with far-flung Cantonese merchant communities. He argues that Chinese immigration to the United States was an extension of these historical “commercial activities” (p. 17). Although he is setting the foundation for an anti-coolie argument, he admits (and thus clouds the issue) that the cost of transit to San Francisco was at least four times the annual income for Chinese laborers, and, therefore, “some Chinese came to the United States through a contract labor system” (p. 21). The following paragraph is even more inclusive, claiming that “the majority of Chinese immigrants came to California during the nineteenth century by means of the credit-ticket system” (p. 21). Under this system, immigrants would repay the cost of transit, presumably with interest, after finding some means of support in the United States. Again, to Americans at the time (and, indeed, to many scholars today), it is difficult to distinguish a contract labor or credit-ticket system from indentured labor. Regardless, someone or some institution was needed with the means to advance substantial sums of money for the thousands of Chinese immigrants who sojourned to the United States. Qin continues to build his argument in chapter 2 by briefly reviewing the push and pull factors that prompted the great mid-nineteenth-century wave of Chinese immigration, and the creation of native place associations. Chinese merchants who established business enterprises in San Francisco to provide goods and services to sojourning laborers also established native place huiguan. These mutual aid societies offered a variety of services for those who emigrated from the same hometown or district, including housing and labor assistance, dispute settlement, and the [End Page 477] repatriation of remains. In chapter 3, Qin describes how racial tensions and discriminatory legislation directed against Chinese as an ethnically distinct group prompted the largest six huiguan to consolidate as the Zhonghua Gongshuo (Chinese public association), generally known as the Six Companies. Qin argues that the Six Companies represented a highly significant change from the traditional native place huiguan to a comprehensive national organization. He further argues that the Six Companies would play a critical role not only in the protection of Chinese immigrant rights in the United States, but also in the development and use of nation-state diplomacy and the transference of this skill to the Qing government. In chapter 4, Qin returns to the issue raised in chapter 1 concerning the widely accepted view that the Six Companies acted as a labor broker for Chinese immigrants. He provides a historical context for anti-Chinese activism in the 1860s and 1870s based on unchecked Chinese immigration and declining economic conditions in California. The American view of coolieism and the perceived role of the Six Companies in brokering indentured labor was succinctly captured by the San Francisco Chronicle: the Six Companies has “‘almost despotic authority over the Chinese immigrants, compelling a long term of...

Study of LI Gao's native place

Li Gao, a famous doctor in Jin and Yuan Periods, was born in Zhengding County, Hebei Province according to History of the Ming Dynasty. But his tomb in Adang Village, Huangling County, Shanxi Province, the epitaph of tombstone (set up in 1828, the 8th year of the Daoguang Period) and the Li's Genealogica Tree held by the villagers show that LI Gao was the 4th generation of local Li's family. Literatures of the Republic of China period, like Huangling County Annals, also recorded that Huangling county as LI Gao's native place. All of the historical relics, oral historical materials and literatures are of historical value and LI Gao's native place needs to be further investigated.

Prospective analysis of reasons for non-enrollment in a phase III randomized controlled trial

This study aims to provide information on the accrual rate and to identify the reasons for non-enrollment of oral cancer patients into a clinical trial. Prospective study conducted at the Tertiary Cancer Centre (India). Patients eligible and screened for the oral cancer adjuvant therapy (OCAT) were logged prospectively and reasons for non-enrollment were documented which were broadly divided into patient and trial related. Demographic characteristics of the non-enrolees were compared with the enrolled. Factors predicting non-enrollment were analyzed using multivariate logistic regression test. A total of 1335 patients with locally advanced cancer of the oral cavity were screened of whom 498 (37%) could be enrolled. Among non enrolled 837 patients, 182 (22%) had the trial-related reasons and 655 (78%) had patient-related reasons. Most important patient-related reasons were patients' preference of taking treatment closer to their native place (26.2%), lack of interest (16.8%) in trial participation. Anticipated poor compliance to treatment (5.9%) and follow-up (6.6%), inability to start treatment in time (6.2%) were important trial-related reasons for non-enrollment. Multivariate analysis identified the genders (female), education (illiterate), occupation (laborer) and non availability of support system in the city as significant predictors of non-enrollment. Both trial design and patient factors were important causes of non enrollment in eligible patients. Patients' need for being closer to home and refusal to participate were the most common reasons for non-enrollment.

The New Evangelization and Canon Law

The New Evangelization and Canon Law Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke (bio) Introduction First of all, I wish to thank His Grace, Archbishop John J. Myers, for the invitation to give one of the Gerety Lectures during the year of celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Foundation of Immaculate Conception Seminary of the Archdiocese of Newark. I also thank Monsignor Robert F. Coleman, Rector of the Seminary, with whom I was privileged to share some years of the study of Canon Law in the 1980s, for his assistance in making the arrangements for my presentation and for the warm hospitality of the Seminary. While I am honored to make some modest contribution to the work of the Archbishop Gerety Fund for Ecclesiastical History, I am particularly pleased that my contribution is part of the celebration of the sesquicentennial of Immaculate Conception Seminary. The seminary is the heart of a diocese. As Our Lord Himself made clear, from the very beginning of His public ministry, by His call of the Apostles, the life of the Church depends upon the service of worthy shepherds who act in the person of Our Lord, Head and Shepherd of the flock, in every time and place. The Bishop who gives his first and best attention to the seminary will thereby give a true shepherd's care to all the faithful entrusted to him by Our Lord. My presence with you, this evening, is meant, in a particular way, to express heartfelt [End Page 4] congratulations to the Archdiocese of Newark, whose faithful have so steadfastly and generously supported the work of the Archdiocesan seminary, and to underline the fundamental importance of the continued support of Immaculate Conception Seminary for the life of the Church in the Archdiocese, now and in the future. My presentation responds to the work of the Archbishop Gerety Fund for Ecclesiastical History by addressing the present situation of the Church in a totally secularized culture and the response of the Church to the culture of our time. The response is a new evangelization. After treating the question of the new evangelization, in some depth, especially in the teaching of the Venerable, soon to be Blessed, Pope John Paul II, and of the Servant of God Pope Paul VI and of Pope Benedict XVI, I will give particular attention to the state of the Church's canonical discipline and its irreplaceable role in the work of the new evangelization. While the presentation addresses a number of particular phenomena in the recent history of the Church, it seeks to interpret those phenomena within the perspective of the organic life of the Church, handed down to us, in an unbroken line, from Our Lord's consecration and commissioning of Saint Peter and, with him, of the College of the Apostles. While the question which I am addressing pertains to the life of the universal Church, I trust that its application to the life of the Church in the United States of America will be sufficiently evident, so that I serve faithfully the purpose of the Archbishop Gerety Fund for Ecclesiastical History. The Call to the New Evangelization in the Magisterium of Pope John Paul II The pontificate of Pope John Paul II may be rightly described as a tireless call to recognize the Church's challenge to be faithful to Her divinely-given mission in a totally secularized society and to respond to the challenge by means of a new evangelization. A new evangelization is teaching the faith through preaching, catechesis and all forms of Catholic education; celebrating the faith in the Sacraments and in their extension through prayer and devotion, and living the faith through the practice of the virtues, all as if for the first time, that is, with the engagement and energy of the first disciples and of the first missionaries to our native place. In his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles Laici, "On the Vocation and the Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the [End Page 5] World," the Venerable Pope John Paul II described the contemporary situation of the Church in the world with these words: Whole countries and nations where religion and the...

Of Male Exiles and Female Nations: “Sexual Errancy” in Haitian Immigrant Literature

Of Male Exiles and Female Nations“Sexual Errancy” in Haitian Immigrant Literature Corine Tachtiris (bio) With up to one-fourth of all Haitian nationals actually living abroad, it is unsurprising that there should be a flourishing “Haitian” literature outside the country. The fact of late-twentieth-century Haitian migration is inseparable from the reign of François and then Jean-Claude Duvalier from 1957 to 1986. In addition to extreme poverty, the Duvalier regimes were marked by brutal political oppression and extreme forms of censorship. To speak out against the government was to risk beating, imprisonment, or murder, and thus writers in particular found themselves the targets of the Tontons Macoutes—the nickname given the Volontaires de la Securité Nationale, the Duvaliers’ own police force. Rather than in a single mass migration, Haitians left the country in wave after wave, and thus Haitian writers abroad do not fall into one generation. René Depestre, for example, first went into exile in 1946. He studied in France before it, too, expelled him. After traveling to Czechoslovakia and a series of Latin American countries, Depestre spent two decades in Cuba as a committed Communist. His eventual disillusionment with the Party led to his departure once more for France in 1978, where he remains today, an actively writing eighty-five-year-old. Émile Ollivier, fourteen years Depestre’s junior, left Haiti eighteen years after him, in 1964. He, too, studied in Paris, but settled immediately afterwards in Montreal, where he remained until his death in 2002. Also becoming a part of Montreal’s sizeable Haitian immigrant community was Dany Laferrière, born thirteen years after Ollivier, in 1953. A journalist at the time of his departure, he decided to immigrate in 1976 after the murder of a close friend. Although he lived for some time in New York and Miami, Laferrière has since returned to Montreal for good. While they followed different trajectories at different times, criticism on these three authors has often centered around similar questions of exile.1 How have these writers experienced their time abroad? What do their texts say about exile? How can we understand the Haitian immigrant in relation both to the host nation and to Haiti? In fact, all three writers resist the label of exile in both their literary work and in interviews or other personal texts. They, and the critics reading them, have questioned the pain associated with that word and the possibilities that it seems to foreclose of new ties being formed. Edward Said, for example, describes exile as “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted” (159). While the oeuvre of Depestre, Ollivier, and Laferrière are not without a certain nostalgia, such a statement hardly characterizes their experience, either textually or biographically. Depestre, to cite just one instance, insists: [End Page 442] No, I’m not nostalgic for my native country because Jacmel [his hometown] is in me and is part of my imaginary. . . . No doubt it’s because I was never dispossessed of my past that I’ve never experienced sadness in thinking of Haiti. It’s also because, very early on, I integrated the idea that the whole world is my homeland into my reflections, so that I’ve never had that feeling of exile which, since the time of Antiquity, has been associated with a certain asceticism. Quite the contrary, I see exile as a joy, an enrichment. (Chanda 37, my translation) Depestre, like his compatriots, focuses on the possibilities that living outside of Haiti affords him, but at the same time avoids alienation from his own past. Exile allows for what Ollivier terms “multiple belongings” (Lettres 7), and in this case Haiti becomes only one belonging among many. In this sense, I suggest that we might talk about these writers and their work as “errancy” rather than “exile,” to use a concept outlined by Édouard Glissant. Glissant (after the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) associates the native country with the root. The exile is rooted in his or her native culture, which is perceived as monolithic and...

A Clash of Native Space and Institutional Place in a Local Choctaw-Upper Creek Memory Site: Decolonizing Critiques and Scholar-Activist Interventions

This essay - a combination of authorial narrative and scholarly critique - examines a grassroots organization's (Friends of Historic Northport) campaign to preserve a site in west Alabama where a pivotal Choctaw-Upper Creek battle took place in 1785. The organization has faced opposition from city planners and business leaders intent on developing the site. I argue herein that these institutional agents have maneuvered within colonial contexts and neocolonial ideologies to mute the voices of indigenist-centered preservation efforts, mostly by occluding a key Native-centered narrative that affirms the battle's location. In the process, Native memories and indigenous "space" have been ignored, and a presentation of these memories has been left out of the "place" of the site. Here, Native memories are made illegitimate by the trumping of oral stories with paid-for physical evidence deemed authoritative as a part of municipal "governing rules." In addition to demystifying the institutional agents' colonial and neocolonial renderings, this essay offers an interventionist charge through prescriptive decolonial tactics to remedy this particular moment of neocolonization. These more local decolonial prescriptives are then extended to general struggles involving Native memory and "space."

Tukusngaluĝa, or the Chiefs’ Gathering Place: A Bureaucratic Case History of an Alaska Native Heritage Site in the Aleutian Islands

In 1991, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) ANCSA archaeologists investigated an ANCSA 14(h)(1) application for a Native historical place on the north shore of Amlia Island. Two circular depressions were located and tested. The tests did not produce any cultural material. BIA subsequently certified the site ineligible. The site was reinvestigated by BIA archaeologists in 2001. This paper reports on the results of that reinvestigation, as well as on ways in which politics affect the fate of Alaska Native heritage sites.

On Being “Close to Nature”: Identity, Politics, Place

Dominant culture in North America has persistently imagined native place as being “'in” or “close to” nature. Ideas about relatedness to or closeness to nature are often used, by those of European descent and natives alike, to place and divide native and white as distinct ethnic groups. But such a notion is a fault line capable of misrepresenting as much it represents, confining members of a group in places they may not inhabit. The word “native” has become a metonym for “'nature,” and this idea has implications for the kinds of places (both real and fictive) native peoples are permitted to inhabit.

Native (review)

Reviewed by: Native Elizabeth Abele Native. By William Haywood Henderson. Introduction by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. 250 pages, $18.95. Bison Books' reissue of Native places the novel by William Haywood Henderson squarely within the context of Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" and the death of Matthew Shepard, both of which its original publication date, 1993, predates: "The themes played out in these events, Henderson handles subtly and delicately in this strange and urgent and painful novel" (ix). Though there are thematic similarities between these three narratives, and though it is appropriate that this novel receive a wider readership, the ambiguities of Native go beyond being either a "gay cowboy love story" or the portrait of a western hate-crime. At the heart of the novel is Blue, a twenty-three-year-old ranch foreman who is in love with the landscape of his Wyoming community, both geographic and personal. His wandering father deposited him and his mother there, rationalizing that the physical beauty could compensate for their abandonment: "These are your mountains. Maybe that's why I [End Page 433] brought you here" (182). Blue has remained tangential to the folks he has grown up with, finding comfort in their company before he returns to the isolation of the ranch and beyond. There is a sense that Blue misses the all-male community of the ranch's past, now that hands live in private trailers with televisions and girlfriends rather than sharing the communal life of the bunkhouse. Overall, Blue is a characteristic western figure: solitary, laconic, and reliable. The novel opens with a scene at the local bar that disrupts Blue's life: He has come to see Sam, a young hand he is drawn to, but their conversation is interrupted by a dancing stranger. Half-Indian Gilbert proclaims himself a berdache, shining a light on the more circumspect Sam. Rather than exhibiting the slow, deliberate behavior of Blue, Sam first recklessly befriends the local bully, Derek, before accepting the dance invitation of Gilbert. Blue and Gilbert both leave Sam to the consequences of Derek's rage. This becomes the pattern of the novel: instead of these three men providing a haven for one another, they continually endanger each other. Unlike Blue, Sam and Gilbert are clear about their sexuality, but like Blue, they are wanderers with unsatisfying pasts. Though Blue is attracted to both Gilbert and Sam, the extent to which this attraction is romantic or sexual is never clear, to Blue or to the reader. Likewise, the town's ultimate rejection of Blue is less about homophobia than about Blue's inability to trust the townspeople. Instead of allowing his community to assist with Sam's recovery and his protection from further violence from Derek, Blue isolates himself to care for Sam. This independence leads him to shirk the responsibility he owes his friends, his hands, and his boss, a betrayal the community does not tolerate. Native is a thoroughly western novel about longing and about the implied promises of the landscape to answer the longing of solitary, gay men who simultaneously yearn for isolation and connection. Like "Brokeback Mountain," this story presents men who move across a sexual continuum rather than conform to simple definitions. It is the complexity, the pain, and the ambivalences of these men that make Henderson's Native compelling. [End Page 434] Elizabeth Abele SUNY Nassau Community College Copyright © 2011 The Western Literature Association

K. Sirvydo <span lang="LV" style="font-family: "Palemonas","serif"; font-size: 9pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: LV; mso-fareast-language: LT; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;">„Punktų sakymų” dalies tarminės ypatybės ir jų santykis su dabartinėmis rytų aukštaičių tarmėmis</span>

dialectal peculiarities of ‘punktai sakymų’ by konstantinas sirvydas in relation with the contemporary east aukstaitish dialect Summary Despite the fact that the original language of ‘ Punktai sakymų’ (Polish ‘Pvnkty Kazan’; sermons) by Konstantinas Sirvydas has been edited, the žadininkai and žalininkai features typical of the author’s native dialect can often be noticed. The language typical of Dabužiai and Griežionėliai settlements supposed to be Sirvydas’ native place is presently devoid of the žadininkai feature. The aforemen­tioned villages belong to the territory of the present Anykstėnai subdialect, which is distinguished by the rotininkai feature (rɔ.tαi instead of ra˙tαi). Yet this feature is absent in ‘Punktai sakymų’. It is possible that at least the outskirts of the Anykstėnai subdialect had no rotininkai feature during the lifetime of Sirvydas. Out of all the contemporary East Aukstaitish dialects, the Sirvintiskiai subdialect is the closest to the one used in the writings by Sirvydas (both the language varieties are characterised by the presence of the žalininkai feature, the absence of the rotininkai feature and the distinction of the short vowels a, e, i, u in word endings). There are two substantial features typical of the phonetics used by Sirvydas as opposed to the contemporary Sirvintiskiai subdialect: 1. Presence of the žadininkai feature. The contemporary subdialect of Sirvintiskiai has no žadininkai feature (the pronunciation is žo ˙dis, and not ža ˙dis), but there are numerous cases of the occurrence of this feature in Ukmergė court witness books of 1669. 2. Retention of non-monophthongised diphthongs uo, ie in unstressed posi­tions. Sirvydas’ language peculiarities give us a clue that in the 17 th century both the Sirvintiskiai and Anykstėnai subdialects might still have had the žadininkai feature, and there was still no monophthongisation of unstressed diphthongs uo and ie in either of them. The contemporary Uteniskiai subdialect is supposed to have lost of the žadininkai feature, but recent audio recordings still indicate cases of its occurrence in the surroundings of Užpaliai, Duokiskis and other villages. It is still easy to find speakers of the Anykstėnai and Vilniskiai subdialects who have this feature. A comparison of facts allows one to conclude that speakers of the Uteniskiai and Vilniskiai subdialects have lengthened the short vowels a and e and made them half-long (tae.p α ‘smears’, la.sα ‘drips’), while the Sirvintiskiai and Panevėžiskiai subdialect speakers have lengthened them to the long vowels (tae.p α , la.sα). Uteniskiai and Vilniskiai subdialect speakers retained the žadininkai fea­ture for a very long period, some of them up to the present. Making a and e long vowels would have resulted in the dephonologisation of ā, ē and a, e; i.e., the word rodo ‘shows’ would have totally coincided with the word rado ‘found’ (both of which would then be *ra˙da.), while mėto ‘throws’ would coincide completely with meto ‘season’s’ (*mae˙ta.). The Sirvintiskiai and Panevėžiskiai subdialects lost the žadininkai feature much earlier (*ā > o, *ē> ė). Thus, there was no danger of dephonologisation of the above-mentioned vowels.