Oppositional Culture Research Articles

Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine

Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine

Reality Television and the Metapragmatics of Racism

In the contemporary United States, racism is commonly thought to be located in the hearts and minds of a particular negatively valorized social figure: the “racist.” Racist discourse is often implicit and indexical, and interracial interactions may be overdetermined by mutual “racial paranoia” (Jackson 2008) about interlocutors' true thoughts. In this paper I argue that the reality television genre has a unique engagement with tropes of authenticity and intentionality that exploits this dynamic of suspicion. I take as an example a conflict that occurred on an episode of Survivor around comments made by a White southern man to an African American woman. In the scenes analyzed, racial paranoia is itself mobilized as a narrative hook. Participants prod each other to reveal the indexical meaning that they suspect is underlying each other's utterances, showing a perceived incongruence between language and intention. Casting, production, and editorial practices contribute to the dramatization of racism as interpersonal conflict. I show that interventions like sound mixing, the use of testimonial interviews, and the editorial placement of reaction shots reinscribe broader cultural oppositions between “authentic” mental states and “false” performed identities.

The use of ‘cultural landscape’ in 19th century German geographical literature

The short article makes a small selection of early German literature containing the term ‘cultural landscape’ accessible for an English-language readership with the aim of enabling a broader discussion of the term. After a brief overview of the usage of ‘cultural landscape’ in geographical research, four German authors and their publications are presented. Carl Ritter appears to have been the first to use Culturlandschaft, in 1832. He was followed by Carl Vogel in 1851, Joseph Wimmer in 1882 and 1885, and Friedrich Ratzel in 1893. Analysis of their use of ‘cultural landscape’ reveals different dimensions of the term: a developmental perspective on cultural landscapes, i.e. cultural landscapes developed from natural landscapes; an opposition of nature and culture; and an understanding of cultural landscape as agricultural or park landscape. The process of cultivation is described with words with a positive connotation. The comparison of these dimensions with recent geographical literature shows that long-standing ideas continue to influence present-day usage.

THE “NINE LIVES” OF OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE?

Some of the more influential research on race and education published in the last few decades comes from the work of John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham (Fordham 1988; Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu 1978, 1987, 1991, 2003). In Ogbu's writing about the oppositional culture hypothesis, he argued that Black students frame their relationship to schooling through the lens of their historic marginalization in the United States. Out of their understanding of their systematic disenfranchisement, Ogbu suggested that “they not only generate theories [that] contradict dominant notions of status attainment and produce disillusionment about the instrumental value of school; but develop substantial distrust for school and its agents which then suppresses commitment to school norms” (Lewis et al., 2008, p. 259). Together, Fordham and Ogbu (1986) expanded on these ideas in their article on the “acting White” hypothesis suggesting that students not only disengage from school themselves, they also put pressure on their Black peers not to work hard in school lest they be accused of “acting White.” Together these two interconnected theories have gained substantial notoriety and have become part of the general commonsense about why Black students are not doing better in school—“the problem,” it is believed, is the academic disengagement or “oppositional culture” of African American students.

<em>Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation</em>, edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Logan D. Browning

Reviewed by: Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation ed. by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Logan D. Browning Jessica R. Valdez (bio) Victorian Hybridities: Cultural Anxiety and Formal Innovation, edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Logan D. Browning; pp. viii + 205. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, $35.00 paper. This collection of essays productively juxtaposes cultural, formal, and discursive instances of hybridity. Collectively, the essays show that Victorian writers not only treated hybridity as a subject but also manifested it in form and discourse. In his rich introduction, U. C. Knoepflmacher offers a succinct genealogy of the word “hybrid” before it became central to the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin. As early as 1807, intellectuals challenged the idea of immutable biological forms and suggested the possibility of development as a result of changes over time. In these early writings, cultural oppositions and “contraries” were seen to make possible new forms of belief and literature (3). The collection that follows Knoepflmacher’s introduction then traces the extent to which “fragments can be reshaped into new wholes,” and is itself divided into three fragments: “Formal Hybrids,” “Discursive Hybrids,” and “Cultural Hybrids” (2). The collection achieves considerable breadth, ranging from essays on Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning to essays on W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan and less canonical writers like Florence Marryat. The first section, “Formal Hybrids,” includes essays that consider the intermingling of different literary forms. C. D. Blanton’s “Arnold’s Arrhythmia” studies the relationship between Arnold’s poetry and criticism. In 1852, Arnold published Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems; the next year, he famously left out the title piece in the collection Poems: A New Edition. Whereas Arnold and others have understood this exclusion to highlight his sense of his poetry’s irrelevance, Blanton instead argues that the “disappearing poem” remains in the background of his prose (15). In place of the failed poem, Arnold offers a “hybrid of negated verse and critical prose designed to mediate the loss” (14). One outstanding essay in the first section, Christine Chaney’s “The Prophet-Poet’s Book,” presents Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as a gendered reframing of Victorian sage discourse. Chaney urges us not to see Barrett Browning’s verse-novel as a failed and fragmentary instance of either verse or novel but as a persuasive hybrid form—“a new form of persuasive truth telling in fiction” (48). On this account, Aurora Leigh is a literary self-portrait that subordinates narrative to character and image in a form that recalls Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). The second section examines an increasingly hybrid reading public and its effect on changing conceptions of authorship. Here, Jonathan Smith’s essay, “Domestic Hybrids: Ruskin, Victorian Fiction, and Darwin’s Botany,” suggests that John Ruskin saw the hybridity of the modern novel intertwined with evolutionary materialism. Ruskin critiques the focus of science on physical corruption; he is particularly critical of Darwin’s suggestion that so-called illegitimate crosses between plants can result in fertility. The third section features cultural hybridity and mingled identities. Ann C. Colley begins the section with her essay, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea Crossings,” in which she examines Stevenson’s blurring of the line between territory and metropole. In her account, the cross-cultural exchange described in Stevenson’s Pacific Island works subverts colonial authority while complicating and changing indigenous cultural [End Page 165] practices. Colley provides a rich analysis of Stevenson’s fascination with the blending of Western and native clothing, including his tendency to dress his servants in a hybrid West-East style. In his introduction, Knoepflmacher admits that the collection is uneven in its emphasis on poetry, and it is true that the book would have benefited from a more concentrated analysis of novelistic hybridity—especially since recent scholarship has emphasized the hybrid nature of the novel and its relationship, in particular, to journalism and the periodical press. Smith suggests that the sensation novel forged a new hybrid between the gothic and the realist novel—and, other critics might argue, the discourse of news. Danielle Coriale’s essay, “Sketches by Boz, ‘So Frail...

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972 by Benjamin Isitt

Reviewed by: Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972 by Benjamin Isitt Ian Milligan Isitt, Benjamin — Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. 458. The New Left was not as new as it might have seemed; it instead needs to be understood as having deeper roots than the more traditional narrative of rupture might suggest. This is one of the key take-homes of Benjamin Isitt’s expansive Militant Minority: that the New Lefts of the sixties, which would provide a crucial support to the path-breaking 1972 victory of Dave Barrett’s New Democratic Party in British Columbia, owed much to those who came before. The Old Left, epitomized by institutions such as the Communist Party of Canada, may have waned through persecution, prosecution, and the revelation of Stalin’s crimes against the Russian people; yet it, and fellow institutions such as the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union, helped sustain an oppositional culture in the province. While the CCF/NDP experienced electoral and organizational nadirs in the 1950s and 1960s, other left organizations – from Trotskyists, student movements, and the women’s movement – helped carry the torch. All of this helps make what happens in the late 1960s and early 1970s all the more significant. Indeed, a reframing of the period is one of the best contributions this monograph makes to the field. Questions of how to periodize the “sixties” have intrigued several scholars; Isitt instead frames his period as that of the “long boom.” This is a compelling approach that helps expand sixties studies. Alongside this social and political narrative, Isitt also reclaims political economy as a fruitful field of study. The interplay between British Columbia’s resource economy, politics, and class dynamics is well fleshed out. For the “Militant Minority” functioned in a context of a political “Tug of War,” waged between labour and capital. The traditional account of post-Second World War [End Page 561] labour relations holds that unions gained legal recognition at the expense of being encumbered in a framework of legal restrictions and regulations. Ben Isitt rejects this “postwar compromise” narrative in his local study of British Columbia. Rather, the compromise for him seems far from settled: wildcat strikes, breakaway unions, and growing nationalism characterized the British Columbian experience as the militant minority interacted with these legal structures. Militant Minority makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of Canadian labour, society, and the 1960s. Indeed, Isitt’s work is an exemplar of the new current of political history growing in Canada today. This book balances the political sphere, social movements, and everyday life well. Militant Minority is generally well written and engaging. The arguments that Isitt builds are steeped in an almost exhaustive amount of primary and secondary source material. He draws on oral interviews, police records, archival documents, and a near-encyclopedia array of secondary sources. The chapters are all well crafted. His chapter on BC’s peace movement was especially engaging; his contention that the anti-war movement was a combination of Old Leftists, unionists, and a new layer of activists helps reinforce the importance of that social movement. There are some problems with this work, however. Isitt’s use of several terms is a bit troubling. At times, perhaps due to rhetorical flourishes, the “militant minority” framework can come off as a bit homogenizing. This is sometimes unavoidable given the scope of the term (which ranges from middle-class professionals in the NDP to militant communist fishermen), but one wonders if “militant minorities” might have been a more apt descriptor. The New Left is also a bit awkwardly defined. Isitt seeks to expand the definition of the New Left, but fails to fully justify this expansion. He rightfully includes groups such as the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), but also (questionably) Trotskyists, and others who would not have self-identified under this mantle. At times, the book is also a bit stylistically clumsy. Isitt’s voice is drowned out by far too many block quotations. Vexingly, the 458-page book contains only 203 pages of...

Sugar, Spice, and Street Codes: The Influences of Gender and Family Attachment on Street Code Adoption

Elijah Anderson's (1999) Code of the Street thesis argues that joblessness, alienation, structural disadvantage, and black status converge to explain higher rates of violence among African-American, inner-city males. Few studies examine whether a similar phenomenon extends to females. Additionally, few studies investigate how family attachment affects belief in an oppositional culture that Anderson calls “street codes.” Using data from the National Youth Survey, the present study addresses these issues by examining whether boys actually embrace street codes more than girls, whether family attachment reduces the likelihood of street code adoption for both boys and girls, and whether the magnitude of the effect of family attachment on street code adoption differs between boys and girls. Ordinary least squares regression results indicate that boys embrace street codes more than girls, but a substantial number of females embrace them as well. Moreover, family attachment reduces street code adoption for both girls and boys.

Work culture among healthcare personnel in a palliative medicine unit

Understanding and assessing health care personnel's work culture in palliative care is important, as a conflict between "high tech" and "high touch" is present. Implementing necessary changes in behavior and procedures may imply a profound challenge, because of this conflict. The aim of this study was to explore the work culture at a palliative medicine unit (PMU). Healthcare personnel (N = 26) at a PMU in Norway comprising physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, and others filled in a questionnaire about their perception of the work culture at the unit. The Systematizing Person-Group Relations (SPGR) method was used for gathering data and for the analyses. This method applies six different dimensions representing different aspects of a work culture (Synergy, Withdrawal, Opposition, Dependence, Control, and Nurture) and each dimension has two vectors applied. The method seeks to explore which aspects dominate the particular work culture, identifying challenges, limitations, and opportunities. The findings were compared with a reference group of 347 ratings of well-functioning Norwegian organizations, named the "Norwegian Norm." The healthcare personnel working at the PMU had significantly higher scores than the "Norwegian Norm" in both vectors in the "Withdrawal" dimension and significant lower scores in both vectors in the "Synergy," "Control," and "Dependence" dimensions. Healthcare personnel at the PMU have a significantly different perception of their work culture than do staff in "well-functioning organizations" in several dimensions. The low score in the "Synergy" and "Control" dimensions indicate lack of engagement and constructive goal orientation behavior, and not being in a position to change their behavior. The conflict between "high tech" and "high touch" at a PMU seems to be an obstacle when implementing new procedures and alternative courses of action.

Drivers of Socially Responsible Purchasing Behavior

Retailers and companies increasingly employ corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a global management strategy. They are motivated to act in a socially responsive manner to their global customers not only to fulfill their ethical obligations as a social entity but also due to the marketing and financial benefits resulting from consumer responses to CSR initiatives. Therefore, many retailers develop or participate in CSR activities and hope their actions can be recognized by others. Further, CSR activities are more likely to be perceived and accepted by consumers who show ethical purchasing behavior while shopping. Ethical purchasing behavior or socially responsible purchasing behavior is formed by their beliefs and norms which are influenced significantly by the culture they belong to. This study examined the differences between two countries with opposite cultures (i.e., the U.S. and South Korea) by considering the drivers (i.e., perceived consumer effectiveness, awareness, collectivism) and a consequence (i.e., satisfaction) of ethical purchase behavior. The findings suggested that perceived consumer effectiveness and awareness are important drivers to generate consumers’ commitment to companies’ CSR initiatives in general and the effectiveness is stronger in Korea than in United States. Implications and limitations were discussed.

Renegotiating forensic cultures: Between law, science and criminal justice

This article challenges stereotypical conceptions of Law and Science as cultural opposites, arguing that English criminal trial practice is fundamentally congruent with modern science’s basic epistemological assumptions, values and methods of inquiry. Although practical tensions undeniably exist, they are explicable—and may be neutralised—by paying closer attention to criminal adjudication’s normative ideals and their institutional expression in familiar aspects of common law trial procedure, including evidentiary rules of admissibility, trial by jury, adversarial fact-finding, cross-examination and the ethical duties of expert witnesses. Effective partnerships between lawyers and forensic scientists are indispensable for integrating scientific evidence into criminal proceedings, and must be renegotiated between individual practitioners on an on-going basis. Fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars with a shared interest in forensic science should dispense with reductive cultural stereotypes of Science and Law.

Native Culture and Literature under Colonialism: Fanon’s Theory of Native Resistance and Development

This article provides a critique of Fanon’s three-stage narrative of native literary and cultural development. Fanon envisions a “stage-ist” narrative of native culture and literature moving teleologically from a moment of total identification with the colonizers to a moment of total freedom, through an ambivalent stage of nativist resistance. The main question this article addresses is: can we take this narrative, with its explicit and implicit theoretical assumptions, as a paradigm of native cultural and literary anti-colonialism? My argument is that such a narrative does indeed provide indispensable insights in illuminating specific moments or in critically explaining certain themes in the native culture of opposition. Fanon shows acute understanding of the salient issues relating to nationalism and nativism, their constructions of identity and of the past, and their relationship to the West in general. I have nevertheless found that this narrative cannot be upheld as paradigmatic of the colonial experience as such. For it is implicitly premised on the Caribbean colonial experience which is particular enough not to be generalized. The limitations of Fanon’s views, which underestimate the vitality and power of native culture, stem from his conception of colonial power as absolute, at least at the early stage of the colonial relationship. This conception of colonial power as total does not, however, take into account the various ways in which this power has been exercised and resisted at different times and in different places.

Working Class Self-Fashioning in Swing Time (1936)

This article argues that the Depression era musical, Swing Time (1936), provides access to understanding some of the forms of socially constructed desire that shaped working class solidarity in the 1930s. In the first part of this article, I explore the roots of Swing Time’s critique of vested forms of desire in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. I argue that Swing Time offers an extension of Veblen’s theory by analyzing the power of mass communication to rewire social circuits of desire. I then explore the meaning of the stylistic realism and the language of protest operating in Swing Time’s narrative. From this I conclude Swing Time offers a critique of capitalism precisely in order to affiliate itself with a new, working class oppositional culture. But in affiliating itself with this oppositional community, Swing Time accepts and reinforces the language of racial privilege circulating within the ‘white’ working class. With a final critical act, however, Swing Time symptomatically reveals the invidious character of white privilege, as well as the fact that the cultural heritage of the (white) working class (swing music itself) comes from the theft and plunder of African American originality.

Morocco, Latin America, and the Problem of Reading

This article analyzes three short stories by Muḥammad Zafzāf, the late Moroccan author, exploring Hispanophone roles in Moroccan literary culture. The analysis finds that Zafzāf writes an Arabic metatext about Spanish language, and speaks about Latin Americanness as a cultural referent, all in order to probe the limits of Arabic. Where Arabic fails to be intelligible—a failure represented in fictional Arabic speakers’ frustrated encounters with European languages and societies—Zafzāf's fiction looks not northward but westward, seeking an explanation in a Latin American exotic. The article places this ethnographic fiction in the context of the modern Arab literary field, where Moroccan literature holds an acutely contested position. Zafzāf renders Moroccan fiction legible to his Mashriqi readership—which makes up a large portion of his audience overall—defining Moroccan identity against a Hispanophone other. This foreign figure's specifically Latin American characteristics change, and challenge, the postcolonial cultural oppositions Arabic literature has historically employed.

The Possessed: The Demonic and Demonized East and West in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg and Dostoevsky's Demons

The demonic is one of the major leitmotifs in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. Like no other leitmotif, it unites in one image two major themes of Mann's text: the fascination with death and the deep‐seated cultural opposition between East and West. In this manner Mann's novel aligns the crisis of West European civilization with an external demonic influence coming from the East. Mann's construction of the demonic in his novel can be traced, on the one hand, to his reflection on contemporary East/West issues. On the other hand, Mann's perception of demonism derives from his enthusiastic reception and subsequent rejection of Feodor Dostoevsky's political and philosophical views, particularly as expressed in his novel Demons (1872). I argue that, despite distancing himself from Dostoevsky amid his political conversion from conservatism to liberalism, Mann still borrows one of Dostoevsky's most controversial ideas—association of the loss of national identity with a devil's pact.

Oppositional culture and educational opportunity

The most common lay explanation for the racial gap in educational achievement in the US is the ‘oppositional culture hypothesis’, which holds that Black students tend to undervalue education and stigmatize their high-achieving peers, accusing them of ‘acting White’. Many believe that, insofar as this hypothesis is true, Black underachievement is unproblematic from the perspective of justice, because Black students are simply not taking the fair opportunities presented to them. This article offers a systematic critique of the normative aspects of this view and some conceptual clarifications regarding the nature of opportunity.

Gesture's community: Social organization in multimodal conduct

AbstractThis article analyzes the multimodal integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. More specifically, I investigate how forms of Gemeinschaft/Gesellshaft community are embodied in the concrete details of multimodal form—in the iconic interplay of multimodal practice and symbolic forms of social organization. Using a focus group interview of community policing training, I show how criss-crossing laminations of participation emerge through novel gestural configurations like multimodal quotation and pragmatic beats to not only pace the rhythm of speech but simultaneously plot the spatial coordinates of social organization. In the course of events, we see how speakers integrate gesture, gaze, and postural orientation into the stream of their utterances to project rhythmically infused meanings of communal identity, social solidarity, and cultural opposition. (Multimodality, community, legal discourse)*

Decisionmaking Regarding Unwanted Pregnancy among Adolescents in Mexico City: A Qualitative Study

Adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean confront difficult decisions when faced with unwanted pregnancies, especially given the region's legal restrictions on and widespread cultural opposition to abortion. Little research has been conducted on pregnancy decisionmaking among young people in this region. This study examines the role of peers, partners, family members, and health-care providers in adolescents' decisionmaking regarding pregnancy continuation or termination in Mexico City shortly after abortion was legalized in 2007. Qualitative in-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted in 2009 with participants aged 13-17 who experienced an unwanted pregnancy. Although participants were able to formulate preferences regarding pregnancy resolution, parents' wishes usually prevailed when their wishes conflicted. Peers were generally found to be supportive, whereas the role of partners varied. Results indicate the need for comprehensive sexuality education to promote adolescents' autonomy, mechanisms other than legal mandates to encourage constructive parental involvement, and confidential counseling from health professionals offering options and supporting adolescents'ability to act on their decisions.

Kids don't want to fail: oppositional culture and the black-white achievement gap

Understanding the causes of the racial achievement gap in American education--and then addressing it with effective programs--is one of the most urgent problems communities and educators face. For many years, the most popular explanation for the achievement gap has been the culture theory: the idea that black students underperform in secondary schools because of a group culture that devalues learning and sees academic effort as acting white. Despite lack of evidence for this belief, classroom teachers accept it, with predictable self-fulfilling results. In a careful quantitative assessment of the oppositional culture hypothesis, Angel L. Harris tested its empirical implications systematically and broadened his analysis to include data from British schools. From every conceivable angle of examination, the oppositional culture theory fell flat. Despite achieving less in school, black students value schooling more than their white counterparts do. Black kids perform badly in high school not because they don't want to succeed but because they enter without the necessary skills. Harris finds that the achievement gap starts to open up in preadolescence--when cumulating socioeconomic and health disadvantages inhibit skills development and when students start to feel the impact of lowered teacher expectations. Kids Don't Want to Fail is must reading for teachers, academics, policy makers, and anyone interested in understanding the intersection of race and education.

Swamplife: people, gators, and mangroves entangled in the Everglades

In Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades, anthropologist Laura Ogden traces the lives of poor, rural whites called gladesmen through the hidden cultural, political, and ecological history of the Florida Everglades. She invites the reader to imagine a world of mythological outlaws, giant reptiles, political intrigue, conservation, and rural life in order to reveal how “oppositional culture and social class operate in our understandings of wilderness in the United States” (p.2). Her monograph is based on the stories and practices of gladesmen, and unfolds as a fluid, tangled, and lush record of the history of the Everglades landscape. Throughout her book, Ogden challenges notions of the landscape as a space of cultural significance scripted by human ideas, customs, practices, and stories. She seeks to reclaim the landscape “as a place of people and human history” through understanding “how what it means to be human is constituted through changing relations” with other species and objects (p.2).

A Comparative Study of the Implementation of EMI in Europe, Asia and Africa

Teaching higher education in English Medium Instruction (EMI) is one of the most important changes made in education policies in many non speaking countries over the world recently. EMI is claimed to have not received enough consideration in Europe, Asia and Africa. This paper presents an investigation, which was carried out from the available literature to discuss the possible ways of implementing EMI in engineering education in Libya. This paper also focuses on the possibilities of implementing EMI in higher education systems in non English countries in Europe, Asia and Africa and problems faced by these countries and suggested solutions. The study find that English proficiency achieved through EMI will increase the chances for graduated students to get better positions on the labour market. Most of countries witness similar problems in courses of the EMI adoption, which include: less funding, lack of qualified teaching staff, lack of student's understanding and interest and cultural opposition.