non-Western Subjects Research Articles

A Voice Sweeter than Salt: Toyin Falola and the Construction of Subaltern Narrative Space

Gayatrl Spivak is arguably most recognized for her 1988 intervention in the dialogue of Subaltern Studies. It is within the intellectual rift of Spiva k's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" that I explore the narrative of Toyin Falola's memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt. While Spivak concludes that the subaltern cannot speak be­cause of the subaltern's placement within existing knowledge production, Fa­lola's "Mouth" articulates a formation that says otherwise. Indeed, in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, Falola's status In the subalternlty of a decolonlzlng Nigeria depicts a powerful subaltern voice with deep implications for knowledge, rep­resentation, authorial location, multifaceted identity paradox, and most of all, the tendrils of modernity.
 Fundamentally, this piece argues against Spivak by constructing a case for the relative authenticity of Falola's voice, despite its incorporation into Western intellectualism. Spivak claims that the subaltern cannot speak so long as the Western academy can only relate to the other within its own investigative par­adigm of the non-Western object. Here, I frame A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, not as a Western co-opting of an indigenous voice, but rather, as an invitation to explore Falola's memoir from the position of the non-Western subject. The work also allows us to move beyond the categories of the Western and non-Western subject to seriously engage the paradox of postcolonial existence.
 In granting credence to the idea of identity paradox, a close analysis of A Mouth Sweeter than Salt reveals the complexities of African subaltern voice and its dialectic with the forces of modernity. While Spivak might argue that this formulation is tainted by the motives of the West, such an interpretation of Fa­lola's memoir also builds ground to discuss alternatives to the Western archive in the development of African intellectualism. Falola's memoir stands as a tes­tament to the legitimization of oral history, micro-historical storytelling, and the disintegration of Western disciplinary divisions between history, literature, sociology, philosophy, and a host of other imported intellectual categories. By outlining the critical duality of Falola's act of subaltern speech, I hope to build a realm in which the African intellectual voice is not artificially segmented from the historical influence of modernity, but can also open discursive space to stand on its own ground.

Sisterhood and "Doing Good": Asymmetries of Western Feminist Location, Access and Orbits of Concern

There are a variety of discourses and practices that position Western feminists (and Western political subjects more generally) as people who have a moral and political obligation to concern themselves with the welfare, suffering, or empowerment of non-Western subjects, often women, and intervene to “do good” on their behalf. Conversely, there are virtually no discourses and practices that assign moral and political obligations to non-Western feminists (or non-Western political subjects more generally) to intervene in matters involving the welfare or suffering of Western subjects, including women. A central goal of my paper is to make this asymmetry explicit and distinguish it from charges such as “essentialism” more commonly made against Western feminist representations of their Others. I explore the consequences of discourses and practices that construct Western subjects as entitled to and obligated to concern themselves with the world entire, while not extending this global scope of concern to non-Western subjects. I critically examine, among other things, the roles assigned Western-funded NGOs in enabling Western subjects to engage in practices of “doing good” and I explore alternative possibilities that are more explicitly “political.” Along the way, I examine certain blind spots in Western political theory that appear connected to the picture of Western subjects as obligated to “do good” in distant places. My analysis engages substantially with Alison Jaggar’s essay, “Saving Amina,” drawing attention to matters of agreement and possible disagreement.

Digital Archiving as Social Protest

The relationship between journalism and social marginalization is a relatively understudied area in digital journalism studies. Our case study of Dalit Camera (DC), an online news archive and chronicle based in India, examines how historically disadvantaged Dalits, or “Untouchables,” are leveraging digital tools to narrate their oppressive past to the outside world parallel to the rise of political censorship in India. As part of its archiving process, DC is preserving footage of Dalit resistance against hegemonic domination by caste Hindus. Through their grassroots network of citizen journalists, DC is also engaged in reporting caste-based discrimination and violence today, contributing to the Dalit social movement for equality and justice. Our study provides the first examination of Dalit social protest as a function of digital news archiving, in the process bringing a non-Western subject typically reserved for Subaltern Studies to digital journalism studies as a potent example of citizen journalism and participatory online culture in a censorious media climate. We argue that the growing field of digital journalism studies must leverage productively with area studies scholarship, such as Subaltern Studies, in order to advance a deeper understanding of journalism cultures in the Global South.

Relationships with the Past: How Australian Television Dramas Talk about Indigenous History

Relationships with the Past: How Australian Television Dramas Talk about Indigenous History

The White Side of Migration: <i>Reflections on race, citizenship and belonging in Sweden</i>

‘The migrant’ tends to be imagined as a non-privileged, non-white, non-western subject in search of a better future in Europe or the United States and as such is a pre-constituted subject shaped by notions of marginalization and poverty. What kinds of stories are obscured by this recurrent image of ‘the migrant’ and how do such categorizations hamper the analysis of privilege, belonging and white normativity within studies of migration? Why are some individuals not regarded as migrants despite their migrant status? Why are other individuals seen as migrants and thus denied their national belonging in spite of their formal status as national citizens? The article develops analytical tools on migration, belonging and citizenship, with particular attention to (a) autochthony and belonging, (b) race and citizenship and (c) white capital.

The serial portrait and coeval time on the cable car up Manakamana mountain

Abstract This article argues that by framing Manakamana (Spray and Velez, 2013) as a serial portrait, we illuminate the ways that the film situates its Nepalese cable car riders, its American filmmakers and its largely western spectators in an emergent and shared time, and that the sequencing of human subjects that is central to this serial portrait posits an alternative to that once ubiquitous tendency to cast non-western subjects into a time that is past. In 1983’s Time And The Other, Johannes Fabian decried the discursive and ideological effects of denying ethnographic subjects their coevalness, but in Manakamana’s formal experimentation and its strategic deployment of cinematic homologies and spiritual allegories, a reflexivity emerges to reframe the way representations of people can be organized in time.

Through eurocentric logics

This study aims to explore the construction of difference in foreign news discourse on culturally similar but politically different non-Western subjects. Applying critical discourse analysis (CDA) together with a critique of Eurocentrism, the study examines difference in newspaper constructions of government supporters and oppositional groups in Venezuela. Discursive differences are evident in the strategies used for constructing the two groups with regard to political rationality and violence. Government supporters are associated with social justice, Venezuela’s poor, dogmatic behavior, and the use of political violence. The opposition, in contrast, is constructed as following a Western democratic rationale that stresses anti-authoritarianism. This group is primarily associated with victims of violence. While the opposition is conveyed as being compatible with Eurocentric values and practices, government supporters to great extent deviate from these norms. Such constructions serve to legitimize politico-ideological undercurrents of Eurocentrism, as the defense of liberalism.

Interpreting Prevotella and Bacteroides as biomarkers of diet and lifestyle.

BackgroundIn a series of studies of the gut microbiome, “enterotypes” have been used to classify gut microbiome samples that cluster together in ordination analyses. Initially, three distinct enterotypes were described, although later studies reduced this to two clusters, one dominated by Bacteroides or Clostridiales species found more commonly in Western (American and Western European) subjects and the other dominated by Prevotella more often associated with non-Western subjects. The two taxa, Bacteroides and Prevotella, have been presumed to represent consistent underlying microbial communities, but no one has demonstrated the presence of additional microbial taxa across studies that can define these communities.ResultsWe analyzed the combined microbiome data from five previous studies with samples across five continents. We clearly demonstrate that there are no consistent bacterial taxa associated with either Bacteroides- or Prevotella-dominated communities across the studies. By increasing the number and diversity of samples, we found gradients of both Bacteroides and Prevotella and a lack of the distinct clusters in the principal coordinate plots originally proposed in the “enterotypes” hypothesis. The apparent segregation of the samples seen in many ordination plots is due to the differences in the samples’ Prevotella and Bacteroides abundances and does not represent consistent microbial communities within the “enterotypes” and is not associated with other taxa across studies. The projections we see are consistent with a continuum of values created from a simple mixture of Bacteroides and Prevotella; these two biomarkers are significantly correlated to the projection axes. We suggest that previous findings citing Bacteroides- and Prevotella-dominated clusters are the result of an artifact caused by the greater relative abundance of these two taxa over other taxa in the human gut and the sparsity of Prevotella abundant samples.ConclusionsWe believe that the term “enterotypes” is misleading because it implies both an underlying consistency of community taxa and a clear separation of sets of human gut samples, neither of which is supported by the broader data. We propose the use of “biomarker” as a more accurate description of these and other taxa that correlate with diet, lifestyle, and disease state.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40168-016-0160-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Living in the Marikana world: The state, capital and society

The ‘Marikana massacre’ that happened on 16 August 2012 at Lonmin mine near Rustenburg in the North-West province of South Africa, in which the South African police shot dead 34 mineworkers for protesting against low wages and other unbearable employment and/or living conditions, cannot be understood as merely an accidental event. It may therefore be useful to view the massacre as one of those tragedies that dramatises, in visible ways, the generally hellish conditions which the peoples of the non-Western world have come to endure ever since the advent of Western modernity. The ‘voyages of discovery’ undertaken by figures such as Christopher Columbus after 1492 marked the commencement of a world system characterised by a Western-centred modernity whose ‘darker side’ inflicted hellish conditions on the non-Western subject, while its ‘brighter side’ in the West saw positive developments – from the 16th-century ‘rights of people’ to the 18th-century ‘rights of man’, up to the late-20th-century ‘human rights’. This article is a decolonial critique on the Marikana massacre and seeks to explain how the modern world system has, since its advent in 1492 as global power structure, been producing a series of ‘Marikana-like’ conditions and events on the part of the non-Western subject that underlies its hierarchical arrangement. The article's point of departure is that rather than understand the Marikana massacre as a unique event or accident, it can better be characterised as a sign of the non-Western subject's subjection to Western-centred modernity. The article explicates how the modern South African state and capital are part of the same ‘colonial power matrix’ (Quijano 2000a), hence the two were bound to be on the same side against labour during the Marikana massacre.

Promoting democratic norms? Social constructivism and the ‘subjective’ limits to liberalism

This article argues that, since the end of the Cold War, the understanding of democratic norm promotion has shifted through three conceptually distinct and chronologically distinguishable stages: the early 1990s view that democratic norms would be universalized with the Cold War victory of liberal ideals and the spread of new global norms of good governance; the mid- to late-1990s view that barriers to the promotion of democratic norms could be understood as the product of state or elite self-interests; and the perspective dominant since the 2000s, that the promotion of democratic norms necessarily involves much deeper and more extensive external intervention in order to transform social institutions and societal practices. Through charting the shifts in the understanding of democratic norm promotion, this article seeks to highlight the problems inherent in norm promotion discourses that emphasize the importance of subjective agency, normative choices, and cultural and ideational frameworks of understanding. A key problem being that, in the downplaying of social and economic context, agency-based understandings tend to degrade the rational capacities of – and to exoticize and problematize – the non-Western subject. The social constructivist approach, which presupposes a closed or endogenous framework of societal reproduction, has thereby been a crucial paradigm through which Western democracy promotion discourses have shifted to emphasizing the subjective policy barrier posed by the allegedly ‘non-liberal’ mindset of the non-Western subject.

Beyond the securitisation of development: The limits of intervention, developmentisation of security and repositioning of purpose in the UK Coalition Government’s policy agenda

Through reviewing the UK Coalition Government’s reconfiguration of the security–development nexus, this paper tracks a move away from the ‘securitisation of development’, toward the ‘developmentisation of security’. It demonstrates how discourses of capacity building from the bottom-up have replaced the assertions of global cosmopolitanism of the Blair years. We argue that the Coalition is attempting to portray this as a ‘post-interventionist’ approach, in an attempt to resolve the crisis of faith in legal accountability, moral responsibility and political responsibility inherited from the previous administration, and respond to their legacy of international interventions. Rather than emphasise the agency of liberators, the UK Coalition therefore now cultivates the image of a chaotic world, populated by vulnerable subjects in need of empowerment, where instrumental interventions are less certain. Thus, reconfiguring the intervention/non-intervention binary, more recent engagements in Libya, Afghanistan and the Arab Spring have been framed by and retreated into facilitating the resilience of non-Western subjects.

The uncritical critique of ‘liberal peace’

AbstractFor many commentators the lack of success in international statebuilding efforts has been explained through the critical discourse of ‘liberal peace’, where it is assumed that ‘liberal’ Western interests and assumptions have influenced policymaking leading to counterproductive results. At the core of the critique is the assumption that the liberal peace approach has sought to reproduce and impose Western models: the reconstruction of ‘Westphalian’ frameworks of state sovereignty; the liberal framework of individual rights and winner-takes-all elections; and neo-liberal free market economic programmes. This article challenges this view of Western policymaking and suggests that post-Cold War post-conflict intervention and statebuilding can be better understood as a critique of classical liberal assumptions about the autonomous subject – framed in terms of sovereignty, law, democracy and the market. The conflating of discursive forms with their former liberal content creates the danger that critiques of liberal peace can rewrite post-Cold War intervention in ways that exaggerate the liberal nature of the policy frameworks and act as apologia, excusing policy failure on the basis of the self-flattering view of Western policy elites: that non-Western subjects were not ready for ‘Western’ freedoms.

Rethinking Sōseki's theory

This paper builds on the discussion of Bungakuron in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993). It focuses on Sōseki's collaboration with Masaoka Shiki to revive haiku and the links that Sōseki found between the haiku-related genre of shaseibun (literary sketches) and the grotesque, loosely plotted realism of Laurence Sterne. Like Bakhtin, Sōseki recognizes something in early novelistic forms that would later be disciplined out. Furthermore, this paper argues that in the preface to Bungakuron Sōseki provides both an encomium to his dead friend Masaoka and a prescient announcement of the ‘end of literature’, perceived 100 years early from his vantage point as a non-Western subject witnessing the ‘end of empire’ in London.

Western Autobiography and Colonial Discourse: The Case of Rousseau's 'Orientalism'

This essay argues that Autobiographical Studies has failed to appreciate sufficiently the importance of ethnicity in the construction of the western autobiographical subject. Taking a canonical figure of the genre, Rousseau-often, indeed, considered to be the inaugurator of modern western autobiography-it is argued that issues of ethnicity are crucial to this key writer's ways of imagining and narrating himself. It will be shown more particularly that Rousseau's engagements with non-western subjects are critical to Rousseau's narrativisation of the process of the formation of his gender and sexual identities. The emergence of autobiography is often considered to be one symptom of the advent of Modernity. To this extent, Modernity itself can be shown to be constituted by an engagement with issues of ethnicity at the micrological level of individuals' accounts of their own lives, as well as at the macrological level of allegedly objective new sciences such as ethnology and anthropology, which emerged during the Enlightenment.

Analyst Heals Divide Between Eastern, Western Mind Sets

Analyst Heals Divide Between Eastern, Western Mind Sets

Thinking Developmentally: The Bible, the First‐Year College Student, and Diversity

Abstract. The Bible is a non‐western text subject to a variety of interpretations and applications – constructive and destructive. The academic study of the Bible, therefore, requires critical thinking skills and the ability to engage with diversity. The reality is that most first‐year college students have not yet developed these skills. Rather than bemoan students’lack of development, the essay explores ways of teaching and applying critical thinking within the context of an introductory Religion course. The essay claims that first‐year college students can better learn the content of the discipline and function in a pluralistic world if the teaching of critical thinking skills is a part of the pedagogy.

Political theory: why it seems universal, but isn't really

With its claim to be the Master Science, political theory gives the appearance of being a universal discipline. Yet, there are few academic disciplines as stubbornly Eurocentric as this one, both in its unwillingness to accept non-Westerners into its canon of theorists, and its unwillingness to take up non-Western subject matter. Of course, to some extent this is based on simple prejudice. But also there are structural reasons for it. Western political theory is not simply a collection of the best books on the subject. It is a dialogue, and as such it is a story; its key ideas take their meaning in the context of that story. Thus the exclusion of political works that played no role in that story is no judgement on their intrinsic worth. At the same time, Western political theory is the theory (the explanation, the justification, and the critique) of the political form that has hegemony in the world today: the sovereign state. Thus while Western political theory is by no means universal in principle, it contains much that is relevant to the actual situation of anyone who lives under a sovereign state, that is, just about everybody. But it is important not to confuse this “wide applicability” (hegemony) with “universality”.

Intercultural and cross-cultural assessment of self-esteem among youth in Twenty-first Century South Africa

The perceptions of self may differ from one cultural context to another. I explored this possibility in 191 South African children between 12 and 13 years of age. This paper is an extension of research on the appropriateness of Marsh/Shavelson model of self-concept for the nonWestern subjects. Responses to a standard Self-Description Questionnaire-1 (SDQ-1) revealed, the item-scale correlations and reliability coefficients obtained were encouraging. Factor analysis generally supported both the specific facets of the SDQ-1 and the existence of an underlying general self-concept factor. These results are then considered in relation to other evidence of the cross-cultural validity of both the SDQ-1 and the Shavelson model of the self. Comparisons of the South African means to those of previously reported Australian, Kenyan, Nigerian, Nepalese and Zimbabwean children of the same age indicated that there was a tendency for the South Africans to have relatively higher opinions of their personal appearance (non-academic self-esteem) than youngsters from other countries. Alternative interpretations appeared to be useful in gaining better understanding of implications of the results for the school counsellor's role in helping students and teachers build self-esteem. The need to belong, or to feel a sense of self-worth, inclusion and significance virtually affect the learning process. The self-descriptions of Black youth provide evidence that young people are important, vital, and active in nation-building. Recognition should be given to culture and racial-specific views people bring to the counselling relationship.

Parental Bonding Instrument and the Inventory to Diagnose Depression Lifetime version in a volunteer sample of Japanese workers.

This study replicated the factor structure of the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), and explored the relationships of PBI scores to demographic variables. We investigated the association between parental bonding in the parents measured by the PBI, and lifetime history of depression in their children assessed by the Inventory to Diagnose Depression Lifetime version (IDDL) in a volunteer sample of 239 Japanese workers. In factor analyses with varimax rotation (two-factor solution), the PBI items for both parents showed clear bimodality, and the total variance explained by the two factors was similar to that found in previous Western studies. Subjects with a lifetime history of depression reported a significantly lower score on maternal care than did those without a lifetime history of depression. Without requiring 2 weeks symptom duration on the IDDL, low maternal care was also related to a history of depression. The relationships between PBI scores and age, education, sex of respondent, and sex of parent differed in part from those in Western subjects. These results suggested the following: (1) child-rearing behaviors in non-Western cultures can be, similarly to those in Western cultures, described with the PBI; (2) parental styles, as measured by the PBI, may be associated with depression in non-Western subjects; and (3) sociodemographic influences on PBI scores may be different in subjects with different cultural backgrounds.

Sex Differences in Visual-Spatial Performance among Ghanaian and Norwegian Adults

Sex differences in spatial ability among adults in Western cultures are widely acknowledged, but few studies have assessed visual-spatial ability in non-Western subjects with tests that show the largest sex differences, and little is known whether effect sizes for different spatial ability categories are the same across cultures. This issue was addressed by using four visual spatial ability tests (water level, surface development, PMA space, and Vandenberg-Kuse) to collect data from university students in Ghana (n = 197) and Norway (n = 220). Except for the Surface Development test, on which no sex difference appeared in either sample, males perforned significantly better than females in both samples, and the effect sizes (r) were about medium, with no significant between-nationality difference on individual tests. These results showed that patterns and magnitudes of sex differences in spatial abilities were simiilar across cultures. The test intercorrelation patterns in the two samples differed markedly, suggesting that the ability structure underlying spatial performance may be different in the two cultures.