Nomadic Identity Research Articles

THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN MARTIN MCDONAGH’S THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE

The end of the nineteenth century was a turning point for Irish theatre with the establishment of the Irish Literary Theatre as playwrights attempted to write national plays disengaging from the British theatre. This period is known as the Celtic Revival, a period of building a national identity both by political and cultural action, during which the playwrights contributed to the rejuvenation of the old Irish myths and traditions. However, at the end of the twentieth century when Ireland became a multicultural country with multiple identities, and opened to the outer world politically and economically, the Irish theatre, too, started to change its outlook by problematizing the nationalistic elements of Irishness instead of glorifying the national and cultural values. The Irish playwright, Martin McDonagh has also maintained a pluralist approach challenging the traditional and national elements in his plays. Instead of adhering to a national identity, McDonagh believes in cultural pluralism to adapt to the new century. McDonagh’s pluralist approach will be discussed with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘nomadic identity’ and ‘rhizome’. Thus, this paper aims to analyze how McDonagh problematizes the national identity in The Beauty Queen of Leenane by portraying characters, who are incarcerated by meaningless national values and norms.

Baby Come Back: Resident-Digital Nomad Conflicts, Destination Identification, and Revisit Intention

Due to the increasing popularity of remote work, digital nomadism has become a growing trend. Given that digital nomads can stay in destinations longer, their contacts with residents become more dynamic, including numerous social conflicts. By drawing on realistic group conflict theory and social identity complexity, this paper investigates how the negative consequences of social conflicts can be mitigated to strengthen the digital nomads’ identification with the destination and increase revisit intention. Using a multi-national sample of 307 digital nomads from four popular destinations, we find that the negative consequences of social conflicts can be alleviated by stronger cooperative contact through which residents provide instrumental support to digital nomads. Moreover, we find that through enhanced identification and cooperative contact with residents, digital nomads also develop a localized identity that threatens their nomadic identity and thus reduces revisit intention. The study provides insights for practitioners on effectively catering to this segment of travelers.

Crossing People and Time: A Long-term Approach to the Study of Moken Nomadic Identity and Resilience

Crossing People and Time: A Long-term Approach to the Study of Moken Nomadic Identity and Resilience

Feminist Digital Ecology: Mimesis, Fictocriticism and Altering Technological Space

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the ways authors of fictocriticism—a hybrid form of writing that blurs literature and literary-critical commentary— reenvision the affordances of digital media and the rise of networked technologies in feminist materialist terms. I consider the crucial role of mimesis in fictocriticism to foster “becoming similar with” one’s environment, including its media, and how fictocritical mimesis can serve as a feminist tool for space-making and betweenness. Through close readings of Mauve Desert (1987) by Nicole Brossard, Places Far From Ellesmere (1990) by Aritha van Herk, and Steven Shaviro’s Doom Patrols (1995–97), I make the case that fictocriticism affords an altering and ecological conception of our digital age in which the land and architecture are also understood as networked spaces of nomadic identity and capacious flux.

Nomadyczne tożsamości w teorii polityki Chantal Mouffe

The aim of the article is to structure and contextualize the concept of nomadic identities formulated by Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian political theorist. The text consists of six parts preceded by an introduction. The first part concerns the vision of the social world in Chantal Mouffe’s theory of politics, the second one – the political context of the emergence of postconventional identities. The following parts aim to respectively – analyze Mouffe’s inspiration by the concepts of Schmitt, Derrida and Freud. The next part is a reconstruction of the theory of nomadic identities, analyzed in the context of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject category. The final part of the text is anchored in the conclusion pointing the need for a dynamic approach to the category of political identity, linking it with the challenges of contemporary politics – including the challenge of populism.

Between Geographical Sameness and Historical Selfhood: Identity of a Historical Community in Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy

The issue of the identity of communities considered in a historical context brings many problems. The question of community identity is one of many challenges facing historians. It is subject to a multi-sided debate between extreme positions that seek a hard core of identity, and those that postulate a nomadic identity or deny it any meaning at all. Concerning the thought of Paul Ricoeur, the article will hypothesize that community identity can be considered between the poles of geographical sameness and historical selfhood, based on the model of demography and the model of collective memory. These models relate to the basic philosophical criteria of identity, and allow historians to refer to the multiplicity of aspects that fall within the geographical and historical criteria. By exploring these aspects in a web of interdependence, historians resemble narrators of a novel, who do not create a predictable plot but consider contradictions, twists, and conflicts. Thus, the work of historians acquires an ethical dimension, which is free from influence on the formation of the identity of the community to which they also belong.

What to Read Now: On War and Borders, Italian and Beyond

What to Read NowOn War and Borders, Italian and Beyond Enrica Maria Ferrara (bio) Giuseppe Ungaretti Allegria Trans. Geoffrey Brock Archipelago Books Elena Ferrante In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing Trans. Ann Goldstein Europa Editions Claudia Durastanti Strangers I Know Trans. Elizabeth Harris Fitzcarraldo Editions Marta Barone Sunken City Trans. Julia MacGibbon Serpent's Tail Click for larger view View full resolution Borders have always been a big bone of contention for Italy as a geopolitical entity. For centuries, its territory was fragmented, subdivided into city-states, duchies, seigneuries, run by local and foreign rulers. Even after it was unified in the late nineteenth century, the boot remained frayed around the edges, with the northeastern regions becoming the stage of bloody battles throughout the world wars, as the so-called unredeemed lands considered "naturally" Italian were reclaimed by patriots. It strikes me that this idea of a war justified by a territorial right grounded on a "natural" state of things needing to be restored is still haunting Europe, as we are confronted with spine-chilling images of ravaged cities, gutted buildings, refugee trains fleeing the ruins of Mariupol, Kyiv, or Kharkiv. Human lives are sacrificed in the name of a political and cultural identity that aspires to singularity rather than plurality, sameness rather than diversity. Because of its past, Italian literature is a privileged space to understand the present moment through its war literature produced in the first half of the last century. On the other hand, as Rosie Goldsmith mentioned recently in the Italian Riveter, echoing an interview with Jhumpa Lahiri, Italian literature is enjoying "a moment." This is perhaps due to the fact that its borders with otherness are becoming less neatly defined, more porous, welcoming to diversity. Italy no longer fears losing control of its boundaries. Here are some suggestions of Italian books dealing with war and borders. BORN IN EGYPT to Tuscan migrants in 1888, 1970 Neustadt Prize laureate Giuseppe Ungaretti is one of the most popular twentieth-century poets in Italy, with his first full-length book of verse now available in parallel text, the original Italian and its award-winning English translation. The poems were written in the muddy trenches of World War I, when the poet was drafted to fight in the Karst upon his return to Italy. Despite feeling the strong call of his "fatherland"—nurturing the affirmative tone of poems such as "Vigil," in which the poet describes being "flung beside / a butchered comrade" all night long and yet writing "letters full of love"—Ungaretti identifies as a nomad, shattering linguistic and cultural borders. [End Page 8] ________ IN HER LATEST collection of essays, the world-acclaimed author talks about two impulses animating her writing, one "compliant" and the other "impetuous." The first abides by the rules dictated by authority—of teachers, editors, publishers, audiences—that requires you to stay within the set margins of what constitutes correct and beautiful expression; the other is vehement and unruly. In four compelling essays brimming with citations from her literary models, Ferrante outlines an itinerary of personal discovery that brought her to rupture the patriarchal cage in which she was confined and listen to female voices in Italian and global literature, embracing them in her writing. ________ ACCEPTANCE of the other plays a crucial role in Claudia Durastanti's novel, a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist, the daughter of deaf parents, maps out the places where her nomadic identity develops amidst a constant sense of fluctuation, nonbelonging, in-betweenness. If it is true that "art can free an individual from difference, and difference from solitude," with her nonlinear memoir Durastanti's narrator invents a new hybrid artistic form to bridge the gap between her deaf parents—who believe only in literal truths—and her constantly shifting self. The notion of deafness as disability is deconstructed and challenged as the narrator suggests synesthesia, or a poetic blending of the senses, to define her mother's condition. ________ AT TIMES, WHAT urges to be told not only has no clear outline but is better defined as an absence. This is the case in a few contemporary novels written...

Nomadic Ethics

In response to Maureen Flint’s (2020) performance and essay, Fingerprints and Pulp, on the ethics of truncating and flattening research participants in qualitative research, I extend this ethical concern to the voices of scholars flattened in qualitative research and writing processes. Scholars cite for many reasons, but what is there that holds us to account for our treatments of academics that come before; how can we avoid flattening and abusing those we cite? Through endeavouring to recognise and protect ghosts and nomadic identities of those other than the author in the research and writing process, I propose a new way of re-animating and re-embodying the haunting, nomadic voices in cited texts, in order to minimise further, future truncations and limitations of the other in academic writing. Attending to the ghosts allows for more ethical and just behaviour towards those cited. Seeing the multitude of ghosts haunting scholarly work obliges more ethical behaviour toward those voices flattened in writing.

Digital nomad lifestyle: a liminal experience of identity transition

This study contributes to the theoretical perspectives on digital nomad identity. The aim is to go beyond the construction of the nomadic identity framed as identi-ty work in liquid modernity. In doing that, the paper offers an empirical investiga-tion of how knowledge workers construct and perform nomadic subjectivities through liminal work identities in under-institutionalized contexts and symbolic consumption. Drawing on the life history of digital nomads living in Chiang Mai and Bangkok (Thailand), this work concludes that digital nomads know or make the experience that the nomadic lifestyle is not a permanent way of life but a spe-cific stage of their life paths. Digital nomads frame their projects of self-realization through the digital nomad lifestyle as a liminal transition. The digital nomad identi-ty emerges as a temporary and opportunistic assemblage of neoliberal do-it-yourself biographies toward the emergence of a post-nomadic identity. However, the paradoxes and constraints embedded in the digital nomad lifestyle can freeze digital nomads in an objective and subjective permanent liminal condition.

Articulating Nomadic Identities of Radio Signals

This article presents a new materialist approach to artificial neural networks, based on experimental research in categorization of data on radio signals. Picking up on Rossi Braidotti’s nomadic theory and a number of new materialist perspectives on informatics, the article presents identification of radio signals as a process of articulating identities with data: nomadic identities that are informed by all the others, always established anew. As a resistance to the dominant understanding of data as discreet, the experiments discussed here demonstrate a way to work with a digital archive in a materialist and non-essentialist way. The output of experiments, data observatories, shows the capacity of machine learning techniques to challenge fixed dichotomies, such as human/nature, and their role in the way we think of identities. A data observatory is a navigation apparatus which can be used to orient oneself in the vast landscape of data on radio transmissions based on computable similarity. Nomadic identities render materiality of radio signals as digital information.

Nomadic Identities in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats… and Anna Karenina

This paper examines through Rosi Braidotti’s theory of nomadism two of Marina Carr’s most outstanding female dramatic characters, Hester Swane and Anna Karenina. This critical theoretical approach argues that these nomadic female identities are structurally opposed to fixity. By averting the normative versions of themselves and by engaging in the dynamics of power relations they free themselves from the constraints of phallogocentrism in their different contexts. Hester Swane and Anna Karenina, despite their very different social backgrounds, share the commonality of being nomadic representations. The dramatic works By the Bog of Cats (2004) and the stage adaptation Anna Karenina (2016) display an array of female characters which conform to social norms. This paper argues that unlike these female characters, Anna and Hester are transgressive women; they are ruthless nomadic female fighters and cannot be considered victims of the social constraints that attempt to define them as sub-beings. The paper further concludes that although their deaths at the end of each play are inescapable, their voluntary suicide eludes them to a freer ontological existence.

Queer Poetics in Proust: From Camp Style to Fortuny

Recurring to Susan Sontag’s theorems in Notes on Camp the contribution analyzes main protagonists of the Proustian novel In Search of Lost Time as examples of queer and camp aesthetics that subvert traditional binary discourses of gender and style. In this context the figure of Odette de Crécy is decoded as a hybrid camp figure par excellence and a construction of fluid gender. Recurring on Butlers theorems Odette is analyzed as a construction of nomadic identity which oscillates between hyperfeminine Venus, saintly chaste Zipporah of Botticelli and garçonne. Another main example of queer aesthetics constitutes the figure of Albertine who appears in the pictorial vision of the narrator as a Venetian boy dressed in a Fortuny cloak. Proust’s novel is finally decoded as an archeology of multiple forms of queerness in which queer and campy lifestyle predominates presenting us as pluralistic and polymorphous culture in the sense of Susan Sontag.

Nomadic identities, archipelagic movements, and island diasporas

Nomadic identities have shaped island histories and archipelagic communities since the emergence of the Westphalian state. In the era of postcoloniality, settler colonial realities, decolonial movements, and now climate change, the processes of forced and involuntary migrations as well as states of internal disaffiliation have accentuated the discontinuities between citizenship and island subjects. This special section of Island Studies Journal offers a comprehensive look at how island mobilities and archipelagic diasporas in formation have shaped contemporary notions of nomadic belonging. Islands have historically been entities whose political struggles for citizenship have been frequently repressed. This section explores island becoming, displaced and migrant archipelagic affiliations, and emerging historical understandings of nomadic citizenship.

Disrupted identities and forced nomads: A post-disaster legacy of neocolonialism in the island of Barbuda, Lesser Antilles

In the aftermath of the forced evacuation of the island of Barbuda due to Hurricane Irma, the Barbudan people have experienced an exile and return to a ‘new’ geographical, political, and economic context, albeit on the same island. With the specter of climate change and the potential impacts on island communities and nations, we use Barbuda, sister island of Antigua in the Lesser Antilles, to examine the trajectory of nomadic identities as they navigate changes that threaten contemporary land relationships and culture. Since its first permanent settlement in the 17th Century, the island geography of Barbuda has been fundamental to Barbudan identity and provided continuity into modern Barbudan culture. The breaking down of this close relationship with the land and the introduction of a tourism monoculture reduces Barbuda’s ability to respond to crises such as hurricanes and pandemics. In the challenge of a post-disaster economic context, we will address the conditions pushing Barbudans towards a nomadic identity. We will discuss the nomadic in terms of forced exile and subsequent return to an island changed both by a severe weather event and subsequent policy that is disruptive to Barbudan identity, sovereignty, and way of life.

Autonomy and nomadic Relativism of Digital Identity

The article examines identity in such digital spaces as video games and virtual reality. These digital spaces are defined as interactive artificial environment, autonomous from reality, with its own ontology, scenario, narrative and mythological context. Video games have an immersive experience that is enhanced in virtual reality due to the ability to integrate into the embodiment of the game's model. The type of digital identity that is defined by the video game designer in accordance with narrative and artistic goals is what we call a character. The opposite type is an avatar, it reflects strategies of self-presentation of an individual (user). Digital identity interests us primarily because of the ability to be independent (autonomous) from human physiology and from social categories that are attributed to the user in the real world. Digital identity can be constructed by the individuals in accordance with their preferences, which makes it possible to solve many gender, racial, and age problems. The possibility to integrate into an avatar embodiment and interact with in-game items it reinforces the distance from real embodiment. Moreover, in multiplayer games with the civil roleplay, it can exist in an artificial society and have introspective meaning for another members of the society. Another significant feature of digital identity is the relativism. Digital identity can be relativistic due to the which allow one to have different identities in different games or change the appearance of an avatar in one game during a play time. Autonomy and relativism can be the strategy for the implementation of projects of nomadic identity by Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, in which subject is not sticked to any constants, but constantly defines and redefines oneself through performative acts.

José F. A. Oliver zwischen Politik und Literatur: von Häusern, Müttern und Muttersprachen

José F. A. Oliver between Politics and Literature: of Houses, Mothers and Mother Tongues. Born in the Black Forest to Andalusian parents, the poet José F. A. Oliver has developed in recent decades a complex oeuvre in which multiple languages (German, Spanish, Alemannic and Andalusian) and plural kinships play a chief role. The present paper analyses the prose works of José F. A. Oliver as a fragmentary “language memoir” (Kaplan/Kramsch) while at the same time trying to reconstruct his nomadic identity between and across regions and languages. Special attention will be paid to José F. A. Oliver’s use of the metaphors of multiple mothers and the two-storey house when referring to his own multilingual upbringing and literary habitus. In stark contrast to conceptual models of monolingualism which posit the mother tongue as the unique and irreplaceable buttress of national loyalties and literary creativity, José F. A. Oliver’s work pleads for an alternative affective relationship to a multiplicity of mother tongues (in plural). In so doing, the present paper underscores the political dimension of José F. A. Oliver’s metaphors for multilingualism. His alternative vision allowing the peaceful coexistence of multiple affective loci expressed in very different mother tongues questions the rigid exclusivity of German citizenship politics while simultaneously bringing to light the emancipatory and democratic potential of transregional and multilingual (e.g. Black Forest – Andalusia / Alemannic – Andalusian) identities beyond a national monolingual rationale.

HOSPITALIDADE E RELIGIÃO NÓMADA: IDENTIDADE PARA ALÉM DA VIOLÊNCIA

Partindo de uma noção fechada de identidade, seja pela sua redução territorial seja pela sua redução cultural ou mesmo individual, que poderia encontrar apoio numa concepção de religião como posse exclusiva da referência a um único Deus verdadeiro ou como processo sacrificial, chegar-se-á a uma relação inevitável entre religião e violência. Propõe-se aqui um outro princípio, inspirado em Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Jan Patocka e Emmanuel Levinas, que explora a dimensão excessiva e gratuita do religioso, interpretado como responsabilidade e com aplicação concreta no dinamismo da hospitalidade incondicional. Isso origina identidades religiosas nómadas, as quais estariam, em princípio, imunes à possibilidade de violência, a não ser que se trate de uma “violência” contra a violência, por exigência identitária.

MF Husain’s Hindi AutobiographyEm. Ef. Husain kī kahānī apnī zubānī

Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the body as a socio-cultural artefact and the exterior of the subject bodies as psychically constructed, and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic identities, in this article I introduce world-renowned Indian painter MF Husain’s verbal and visual autobiographyEm. Ef. Husen kī kahānī apnī zubānīas a series of sketches of a performative self, surfing the world in space and time. Bodies and spaces are envisioned as “assemblages or collections of parts” in constant movement, crossing borders and creating relationships with other selves and other spaces. People and places become a catalyst for manifestations of the self in art – MF Husain being foremost a painter – and eventually also in literature. I look for strategies that MF Husain uses in order to construct or deconstruct the self through crossings and linkages. I try to investigate how the self is performed inside and outside private and public spaces, how the complex (sometimes even contradictory) relationship between self and community is portrayed, and how this autobiography does articulate notions of (imagined) community/ies, nationalism, transnational subjectivity, nostalgia.

MF Husain’s Hindi Autobiography Em. Ef. Husain kī kahānī apnī zubānī Sketches of a Performative Self, Surfing the World in Space and Time

Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the body as a socio-cultural artefact and the exterior of the subject bodies as psychically constructed, and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic identities, in this article I introduce world-renowned Indian painter MF Husain’s verbal and visual autobiography Em. Ef. Husen kī kahānī apnī zubānī as a series of sketches of a performative self, surfing the world in space and time. Bodies and spaces are envisioned as “assemblages or collections of parts” in constant movement, crossing borders and creating relationships with other selves and other spaces. People and places become a catalyst for manifestations of the self in art – MF Husain being foremost a painter – and eventually also in literature. I look for strategies that MF Husain uses in order to construct or deconstruct the self through crossings and linkages. I try to investigate how the self is performed inside and outside private and public spaces, how the complex (sometimes even contradictory) relationship between self and community is portrayed, and how this autobiography does articulate notions of (imagined) community/ies, nationalism, transnational subjectivity, nostalgia.

Being a herder in contemporary Mongolia: Nomadic identity and nationhood building at school

ABSTRACT Construction of a nomadic identity in contemporary society has received increasing attention as the result of multiple challenges, including industrialisation, the formation of nation-states and a global market system. Mongolia provides an interesting case study for examination of the self-representations of nomadic peoples and their intricate relationship with national identity-building in a developing society. Based on an analysis of 28 school textbooks on social studies subjects and the narratives of herders in two regions of Mongolia (Bulgan and Bayankhongor), this study examined the interplay between the ‘Mongol malchin’ (Mongolian herder) identity and the construction of a Mongolian national identity in the state’s dominant discourse and herders’ living experiences. The study’s findings revealed how a nomadic identity is interpreted in post-socialist Mongolian society to accommodate social changes and the political agenda of building nationhood.