Paradoxes Of Identity Research Articles

Post-Soviet Belarus: The Transformation of National Identity

The paper deals with the formation of a new national identity in Belarus under conditions of post-Soviet transformation. Under the term of “national identity” the author means the identity of the population of the Republic of Belarus that will be adequate to its status of a newly independent state acquired after 1991. Special attention is paid to the existing major research approaches to the problem of constructing this national identity. According to the author’s view, both major approaches are inadequate; the author puts forward a new (third) approach that goes beyond discussions on language and national culture, and corresponds to the concept of plurality of identities. The author describes some paradoxes of national identity based on the opposition of “nation” and “people”. These correspond to the Western model of the “creation of modern nations”, which is not fully applicable to post-Soviet Belarus. All attempts to apply this model to contemporary Belarus lead scholars to several “cultural paradoxes” that can, however, be explained within a new approach.

‘Team GB’ and London 2012: The Paradox of National and Global Identities

This article explores the problems associated with ‘national identity’ in the UK and examines the tensions arising between the international and local dimensions of the games through examples of domestic (UK) and international (Brazil, Chicago) media coverage of the key debates relating to London's period of preparation. The chapter proposes a conception of London 2012 as exemplar of an event poised to generate insights and experiences connected to a new politics of ‘cosmopolitan’ identity; insights central to grasping the cultural politics of contemporary urban development – and the paradoxes of national identity in current discourses of Olympism. Properly speaking, cosmopolitanism suits those people who have no country, while internationalism should be the state of mind of those who love their country above all, who seek to draw to it the friendship of foreigners by professing for the countries of those foreigners an intelligent and enlightened sympathy. [1]

Johnny Cash and the paradox of American identity

Johnny Cash and the paradox of American identity

Identity and similarity

The standard approach to the so-called paradoxes of identity has been to argue that these paradoxes do not essentially concern the notion of identity but rather betray misconceptions on our part regarding other metaphysical notions, like that of an object or a property. This paper proposes a different approach by pointing to an ambiguity in the identity predicate and arguing that the concept of identity that figures in many ordinary identity claims, including those that appear in the paradoxes, is not the traditional philosophical concept but one that can be defined in terms of relevant similarity. This approach to the paradoxes will be argued to be superior to the standard one.

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

2008 Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Public Health as Urban Politics, Urban Geography: Venereal Biopower in Seattle, 1943-1983

In this plenary, I call for urban geographers to frame public health as a form of urban politics, theorized as governmentality and biopower. I interpret the politics of venereal disease (VD) in Seattle during the mid-20th century this way, detecting a series of dualities in key dimensions of the governance of VD, thus extending geographers' work on these concepts. There was an epistemic duality between biomedical and social framings of disease, a simultaneous techne between ascending and descending modes of power; a duality between descriptive and predictive visibilities; an identity paradox around which bodies were at risk; and a duality in ethos between conservative and progressive principles. Interpreting the city politics of public health this way foregrounds this local-state function as an important topic for urban political geography and brings a series of literatures together into conversation that have tended to remain distinct.

Paradoxes of diaspora, global identity and human rights: the deportation of Nigerians in Ireland

This article examines the contemporary reversal and rupture of the Nigerian diasporic flow to Ireland through the circumstances of deportation; emphasizing the utility of deportations in the discursive context of national identity, global standing, human rights and racism. Through an examination of the unique relationship between the Nigerian and Irish diasporas, it is argued that the state-level discourse and public policy regarding the deportation of Nigerian migrants in Ireland highlight the presence of ‘parallel’ and ‘catalytic’ diasporas that form what can be considered paradoxes of diaspora. The article also maintains that deportations: 1) facilitate the proliferation of national racisms and human rights violations through the legitimating mechanisms of international law; 2) expose the attempt at insuring a national Irish identity that is racialized as White; 3) bring into sharp relief the simultaneous determination of Nigeria to secure a reputation as democratic and Ireland to preserve its standing as a philanthropic and benevolent nation in the global arena and; 4) highlight the post-national significance of diasporic belonging in a contemporary global context.

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature by Arne Koch

MLR, 103.2, 2oo8 587 Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity inNine teenth-CenturyGerman Literature. By ARNE KOCH. (North American Studies inNineteenth-Century German Literature, 39) Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. 2oo6. 266 pp. C3I; ?47.40; $52.95. ISBN 978-3-039Io-939-5. While the combined impacts of globalization, postcolonial migration, and European unification redefine the relationship between regions and nation in transnational con texts in the twenty-firstcentury,Germany's struggle fornational unification during thenineteenth century faced thecombined obstacles of regional cultural diversity and political fragmentation. Studying the tensions between regional and national identity inGerman Realist literature of themid to latenineteenth century,Arne Koch seeks to unravel the seeming paradox thatprominent authors such as Berthold Auerbach, Fritz Reuter, Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane, Gottfried Keller, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach can be viewed (and have been seen) aswriters of regional literaturewhile still contributing in theirdifferentways to the discourse on German (or Swiss orAustrian) national identity.Starting from the observation 'that regional belonging as constructed via a geographic consciousness often encompasses a sense of national identity aswell' (p. 23), Koch argues convincingly against readings which see region and nation asmutually exclusive or posit a linear development from regionalism to nationalism in nineteenth-century German literature. Exploring the complex interplay between regional and national affiliations and identities inRealist writing, Koch instead highlights the literaryrepresentation of 'simultaneous harmony and contrast' between 'region' and 'center' (p. 25) and the writers' contributions to the emergence of aGerman concept of national identitywhich includes an acknowledge ment of regional diversity. Inmost of these authors he notes a 'sense of thepossibility and even a need tomaintain regional traditions and communities for a coexistence of regional identitieswithin a German nation' as well as 'a critical position vis-a-vis authoritative and homogenizing structures' (p. i68). Auerbach's village tales (Schwarzwdlder Dorfgeschichten, I842) provide Koch with his earliest example. Placed 'in-betweennation and region', novellas such as 'Befehler les' and 'Der Lauterbacher' are shown to 'question' both 'authenticated region and the conscientious superregion' (p. 30), critiquing thepressures ofuniformity inunity and validating 'particularitywithin totality' (p. 43).With reference toHomi Bhabha's con cept of 'DissemiNation', Koch also reads Storm's novellas set inSchleswig-Holstein, such asDer Schimmelreiter (i 888), as representations of 'region broadly as an inclusive and exclusive locality that thrives on a paradox of existing ties to and tensions with theworld outside the region' (p. 57), including Denmark and Prussia. Marking the significance of both regional and national history inRealist fiction,Storm's novella Zur Chronik vonGrieshuus (i 884/85) is thengiven a comparative readingwith Raabe's satirical novella Die Gdnse von Buitzow (i866), untypically set inMecklenburg and therefore said to complement 'the intraregional perspectives of Storm, Reuter, and Fontane' (p. 94). Unsurprisingly, this is one of the least convincing chapters, since this text is clearly not representative of theway inwhich Raabe promotes his liberal ideas of nationhood in stories setmostly inLower Saxony between the Weser river, theHarz mountains, and the local capital of Braunschweig. Raabe's historical novel Das Odfeld, one of his fictional accounts of the interaction between liberalism and nationalism in the nineteenth century, such as Gutmanns Reisen, or one of his social novels, such asMeister Autor, would have allowed foramore appropriate discussion ofRaabe in the context of thismonograph. More problematic than this unfortunate choice of text, however, isKoch's con tinued reliance on binary oppositions between 'center' and 'margins' and between authors who are thought to be 'writingon the inside' and others who are believed to be 'writingon the outside' of the emerging German nation state.Given Schleswig 588 Reviews Holstein's political history,Storm may just be said tobewriting 'from thegeographic margins of theGerman-speaking states' (p. 23), but this does notmean thathis sto ries are positioned 'on the fringes' of the 'unifying process' (p. I03); and locating Auerbach's village tales at the 'margins' of 'theGerman territories' (p. 103) isclearly at odds with linguistic, cultural, geographical, and indeed political realities in the nineteenth century.The lack of a 'center of theGerman territories' (p. I03) has long been acknowledged as one of thedefining elements in the interplay between regional and national identity inGermany, and it isat...

Migrant bodies: Corporality, sexuality, and power among Mexican migrant men

In this study, the authors explored the construction of embodiment among Mexican men who had experienced migration between Mexico and the United States—and between Mexico and California in particular. The body emerged as a basic, fundamental underpinning of the migratory experience and as a space in which relations of gender and power, identities, sexualities, and desire converged. The migrant men constructed the body in specific ways depending on the different contexts they inhabited. Based on these findings, the authors have detected 2 paradoxes that are essential to understanding the relationships among body, power, and sexuality in the context of gender relations for these men: a paradox manifesting as an estrangement from the body in relation to the migratory trajectory, and a paradox of identity resulting from the collapse of the gender and sexual orders in which the men had been educated.

Cooking up change in haute cuisine: Ferran Adrià as an institutional entrepreneur

AbstractBased on a longitudinal, inductive study of a critical case from a cultural sector, this article explores how institutional entrepreneurs initiate change. Our explanation points to four mechanisms:creativitythat generates continuous flow of new ideas;theorizationthat takes stock of these ideas;reputationwithin and outside the field that endorses ideas as worthy of attention, anddisseminationthat brings ideas to the public domain. As novel ideas challenge received practices in the field, paradoxes of logics and identity emerge and provide potential for change.The study contributes to institutional theory by examining a preliminary, understudied stage of institutional change that provides a potential for change. Further, it shows how institutional entrepreneurs engage in the theorization and dissemination of their work. Finally, it reveals how reputation plays a critical role in the dissemination of new ideas and thus in the shaping up of the paradoxes and the potential for change. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A teoria queer e os intersex: experiências invisíveis de corpos des-feitos

A teoria queer emergiu como uma corrente teórica que colocou em xeque as formas correntes de compreensão das identidades sociais no mesmo período em que a problemática dos intersex se tornou socialmente visível. Apesar disso, a reflexão queer sobre os intersex é muito recente. Os intersex impõem reflexões sobre experiências invisíveis, paradoxos identitários e os limites do que compreendemos como humano. Neste artigo, exploro as diferentes definições sobre quem são os intersex, como a teoria queer lida com eles e, concluo com uma reflexão sobre a experiência corporal dos sujeitos marcados como intersex.

The Identity Paradox? Reflections on Fluid Identity of Female Artist

The aim of this paper is to explore the paradoxes in the evolving identity of a professional artist, contributing to theorisation of identity formation and performance. I use an example of a Warsaw‐based female artist of the 1970s’ generation, who has engaged her life experiences in critical practice, Zofia Kulik. Kulik’s identity formation encompasses the process of privately infused professionalism. Her story provides an alternative account of organising identity and professional practice from the local perspective, contributing to the problem of ‘difference’ in work and offers insights into how female professionals, here in the occupation of an artist, can challenge disadvantage and discrimination created by the work context, the art world. The story reveals that contextual factors infuse fluidity in the evolution of creative careers and occupational identities. I conclude that identity construction is an open‐ended process, embracing temporal discontinuities.

Gabriela Meets Olodum: Paradoxes of Hybridity, Racial Identity, and Black Consciousness in Contemporary Brazil

W ith respect to the first part of this article's title, Gabriela is the formidable female protagonist of Jorge Amado's celebrated novel Gabriela, Cravo e Canela. This novel, first published in 1958, has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and its English-language version, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, made the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year. Moreover, the novel was adapted to the small screen as a TV series, as well as to the silver screen. In the role of Gabriela, S0nia Braga, a prototypical Brazilian morena, a term used to designate a mixed-race woman, became a sensation in the 1975 telenovela (soap opera). Braga later received international acclaim when she starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni in the 1985 film adaptation of the novel. When Amado's novel first appeared in print, Gabriela became the latest in a long line of enchanting female mulatto characters in Brazilian literature. To a greater or lesser degree, all of these fictional females, the mixed-race offspring of African and European or of Brazilian Indian and Caucasian parentage, are most often depicted as physically and otherwise appealing literary characters. Whether in literature and other modes of cultural expression, or in real and imagined social existence, exotic, mysterious, coquettish, and sensual women of color, most especially mulatas (mulatto women), constitute both the subjects and objects of a nativistic and, indeed, pan-Luso-Brazilian cult. This cult of the mulata encantada (enchanted mulatto woman) has been codified as a romanticized component of Brazil's national identity and popular culture. Although less likely to occur as blatantly today, in this era of increased black consciousness, the cult of the enchanted mulatto, and mulatto enchantress, has manifested itself in the popular press. To cite an example from the relatively recent past, in 1966, Realidade (Reality), a popular Brazilian magazine, featured, in its April issue, Ensaio em C8r Mulata 'Essay Colored Mulatto Woman.' The lead-in for this pre-Black Consciousness Movement photo-essay reads: preto mais branco-em qualquer proporqio-dai mulher bonita 'black and white-in whatever proportion-produce a pretty woman' (94). Accompanying the seven fulland half-page photos of mixed-race women, are literary testimonials, including the following lines of verse by Vinicius de Morais, a highly esteemed poet and lyricist from Rio de Janeiro:

Gabriela Meets Olodum: Paradoxes of Hybridity, Racial Identity, and Black Consciousness in Contemporary Brazil

Gabriela Meets Olodum: Paradoxes of Hybridity, Racial Identity, and Black Consciousness in Contemporary Brazil

The politics of performative resignification: translating Judith Butler’s theoretical discourse and its potential for a sociology of education

More than any other recent social theorist, constructing a disquisition on Butler’s ideas draws the writer into speculating on the formation of their own intellectual grammar, perhaps to confront the disconcerting truth of how often their own cherished analytical rationality is broken up by glimpses into the imagination of more provocative thinkers. I have come to the conclusion that it is not so much that we self‐consciously assemble all of the resources for the making of research imaginaries as those vivid ideas (and frequently their authors) come to haunt us. Butler’s work has been of this ‘disturbing’ order. The ‘unconscious of intellectual work’ is worthy of more attention than I can offer here but it is important to bear this in mind in the course of the following. In this paper I will describe the concept of ‘performativity’ and its theoretical elaboration in Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter and subsequent and secondary texts. Performativity conceptualises the paradox of identity as apparently fixed but inherently unstable, revealing (gender) norms requiring continual maintenance. Her works thus contribute a new conceptual grammar in the inter‐related concepts of performativity and citationality to denote a reading of gender not as essence nor socialisation, but as the consequence of the performative (i.e. recurring) ‘citations’ of gender thought as actions that institute ‘girling’, for example. Butler’s insistence on seeing gender as constitutive (as literally making the material of the embodied self) signifies the social and cultural forces that come to sculpt femininity and masculinity as norms on the body and the psyche. In arguing that the Butlerian performative has complicated a reading of the discursive and material conditions of the processes of (gender) identification, I will review my own poststructuralist vocabulary with its focus on the sociality of subjectification as a way to interpret and interrogate the power and limitations of Butler’s ideas. Despite the awkwardness entailed in transposing performativity to embodied practices of classed distinction, her work continues to expand the ethnographic imaginary. My exegesis of performativity also serves another purpose, as a methodological comment about academic praxis, as I simultaneously open up and share in the modes of translation used in coming to appreciate Butler’s important and exhilarating theoretical landscape.

Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France (review)

Reviewed by: Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France Jaime Hanneken David Beriss. Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France. Westview Case Studies in Anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004. 156 pp. Beriss offers in Black Skins, French Voices an intriguing portrait of Antillean struggle for recognition and acceptance in France, a portrait which, in addition to providing detailed information about the particular condition of Antillean migrants, prepares the reader for debate on much broader current themes, such as the parameters of postcolonialism, or the role of race and nationalism in a contemporary metropolis where both categories ostensibly have become obsolete. Indeed, as part of a series of anthropological case studies, Beriss's work rightly can be expected to raise more questions than it answers: his very thorough explanations of recent conditions of Antilleans working and living in France and their strategies to effect social change, contextualized by helpful historical, anthropological, and economic information, therefore would serve as an excellent supplement to interdisciplinary or comparative studies on postcoloniality or migration, as the author himself notes in the introduction. Written mostly in a firsthand journalistic style, the book alternates between formal discussions of Antillean history and culture and more properly ethnographic accounts of his encounters and interviews with specific groups or individuals. The first three chapters cover a trajectory of discussion loosely organized around the role of race in France's national imaginary; chapters 4 through 7 address the author's fieldwork more specifically, describing Antillean organization and activism through performance in theater groups (ch. 4), the practice of magic (ch. 5), and religious worship (ch. 6). Perhaps of most interest to the non-specialist reader is the author's underlying engagement of cultural racism as it manifests itself in the Antillean case: borrowing more than he admits from Etienne Balibar's theory of neoracism, Beriss effectively makes Antillean alienation the paradigm of French cultural racism. He repeatedly posits (as does Balibar) the supplanting of former racial boundaries with cultural boundaries as the prominent marginalizing tool of current French nationalism: rather than actively discriminate, metropolitan French culture shuns immigrants and migrants by erecting an unattainable ideal of assimilation as requisite for acceptance into its society, thereby refusing to concede [End Page 150] the diversification of its own national body. Beriss demonstrates the effects of cultural racism poignantly in the first two chapters. In chapter 1, "Finding Creole Identities in Martinique and Paris," he lays out the essential paradox of Antillean identity: namely, that of enjoying the rights of full citizenship in the nation of the former colonizer, on the one hand, and inhabiting the metropolis as yet another unwanted element of the French "immigration problem," on the other. In chapter 2, "What Is the Price of Frenchness?" he analyzes the dynamics of French nationalism in the dichotomy between two recent spectacles of cultural heritage: the 1989 bicentennial of the French Revolution, and the 1998 victory of France in the World Cup championship. Beriss explains how metropolitan representations of "Frenchness" in the events of the bicentennial dismissed the alternative perspective that Antilleans, as descendants of a history of slavery and colonialism, maintain of the iconic foundations of republicanism, thereby disregarding their very presence as a national constituency. He then describes how the victory of a multicultural team in the 1998 World Cup inspired a brief acceptance and celebration of France's diverse population. Somewhere between these opposing national visions, Beriss suggests, lies a way for Antilleans to assert their own version of Frenchness without uncritically adopting the dominant culture. Although the author succeeds in placing questions of Antillean activism provocatively at the intersection of several current topics of study, certain inconsistencies in his critical approach limit his book's theoretical scope. First, his inherent questioning of metropolitan cultural unity in the face of its ignored Antillean elements is undermined by the sometimes indiscriminate use of the qualifier "French," as in the sentence "Isolated among the French, [Antilleans] are overwhelmed by metropolitan values and rapidly lose any sense of identity" (85). Participating in the unproblematic circulation of a semantic division between traditional "French" and "Antillean" referents begs the very question that Beriss means to ask. Similarly...

Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity

Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity

Russell A. Kazal. <italic>Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity.</italic> Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 383. $35.00

Journal Article Russell A. Kazal. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 383. $35.00 Get access Kazal Russell A.. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 383. $35.00. Philip Gleason Philip Gleason Emeritus University of Notre Dame Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 110, Issue 2, April 2005, Pages 504–505, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/110.2.504 Published: 01 April 2005

Becoming old stock: the paradox of German-American identity

Kazal, Russell A. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 383 pp. $35.00 cloth. Kazal's prodigiously researched study, based on his dissertation, seeks to resolve the paradoxical eclipse of German-American in Philadelphia, the third largest American city during the period under study and the goal of German immigration since 1683 (2). This long period of immigration resulted in a sizable population of German stock (first- and second-generation German-Americans) and old stock, (GermanAmericans who could trace their lineage back hundreds of years). Using census information from 1900-1930 for two representative neighborhoods (Girard Avenue, populated by recent German immigrants; and Germantown, America's oldest German settlement but no longer heavily German in 1900), this investigation aims to explain the absence of German-Americans from the national scene in an age of multiculturalism (2). Kazal problematizes the notion of the American melting pot, identifying the circumstances that led to the assimilation and integration of German-Americans into a larger Northwest European or white establishment; this development preceded the age of multiculturalism and functions as an explanation of the disappearance of the German-Americans in an age when diversity was unappreciated. Traditionally, the submerging of German stock into a more uniform American identity has been explained by the contingencies of 20th-century history, i.e., the participation of Germany in two world wars and the resulting backlash against German-Americans (4). While these developments certainly contributed strongly to German assimilation, Kazal demonstrates that German-American identity was already weakening before 1900, as a result of declining immigration and the second generation's restructuring of its identity away from ethnic affiliation and toward assimilation, differentiated along the lines of religion, class, race, and gender. Kazal painstakingly traces the history of middle- and working-class, Catholic and Lutheran, and male and female allegiances, focusing on overt expressions of German-American identity like participation in cultural organizations (the Vereinswesen), the union movement, church membership, and the restructuring of ethnic consciousness away from a German-American identity and toward a Northwest European or white group identity. The roles of mass culture, particularly consumerism and public entertainment, and the nativism associated with the two world wars (particularly World War I) on the development of the German-American identity are also adduced. …