Popular Realm Research Articles

Sports Narratives and Historical Nationalism: Re-Visiting the Context and Use of Field Hockey in Chak De! India

Indian cinema is known for its dramatic narratives that celebrate emotionally elevated visual spectacles through which people from different sociocultural backgrounds come across popular domains of cultural practices, social norms and historical realities that unify them. Field hockey belongs to the popular realm of sports in India which is part of the country’s national identity. India’s participation and success in field hockey at the Olympic Games make it one of the country’s most successful international sports. Indian film narratives about field hockey help to create public discourse about how the sport has historically played a role in shaping national pride and identity in India. Hockey evokes nationalism by symbolizing historical achievements, unity, and cultural identity, inspiring pride and patriotism through the portrayal of heroes, national symbols, and emotional narratives in media and public discourse. The film Chak De! India portrays Indian hockey as a patriotic unifying national narrative and as an empowering discourse that can upend traditional gender stereotypes. It delineates that hockey not only acts as a sports game for entertainment but is an indicator of nationalistic significance and cultural identity that elevates the emotional realm of Indians through the notion of patriotism.

Rediscovering the Poetic Genius of María Irene Fornés

Rediscovering the Poetic Genius of María Irene Fornés Erin Joy Schmidt (bio) I feel we are constantly threatened by death, every second, every instant, it's there. And every moment something rescues us. Something rescues us from death every moment of our lives. For every moment we live we have to thank something. We have to be grateful to something that fights for us and saves us. —Fefu and Her Friends, p. 52 I first encountered María Irene Fornés's Fefu and Her Friends in 1997, exactly twenty years after its 1977 off-Broadway premiere. At the time I was a college freshman, and, quite frankly, was not quite sure what to make of it. I was utterly intrigued by the irreverence of Fornés's dialogue. "Do you think about genitals all the time?" asks Emma as she is gardening with Fefu. At age 19, I was not yet able to grasp the depth and invention of the human condition that Fornés exposed with her dialogue. My play library and theatrical vocabulary was limited to playwrights of the popular realm. I had not yet dug into genres beyond realism and naturalism. What I wasn't aware of at that time but what is not lost on me now is that a seed of curiosity was planted for Fornés in that first read. On the surface, the play seems like a simple relationship play written in the same vein as other popular 1970s kitchen-sink dramedies. The play centers on Fefu Beckman and seven of her friends who gather at her New England country home to rehearse a program for an educational society fundraiser in the late 1930s. Yet as the dialogue unfolds, it becomes clear how profound and nuanced the plot and these women really are. Weaving together the lives of these housewives and philanthropists, Fornés delves into themes of conformity, patriarchal oppression, and the feminine mystique without compromising the unique yet familiar relationships among the women. Writing about a production of Fefu and Her Friends at the American Conservatory Theatre in April 2022, theatre critic Jim Munson observed: "The other thing that makes this play's reputation is Fornés' writing style, which is grounded in realism, but occasionally includes poetry and other flights of fancy. This is also what makes the work so hard to describe." Although the play was intriguing to this young woman, a deeper understanding would only come with age (fig. 1). After that first encounter, it would take another twenty-five years for me to engage with Fefu and Her Friends. During the next decade, I received my MFA in acting, worked as an AEA actor in regional theatres throughout the East Coast, and taught performance at several colleges. I was introduced to all manner of plays and playwrights with, as would be expected, the most offerings from the theatrical canon of "well-made plays." Fornés's name would come up among the other surrealists, but more as a nod to her oddness than her brilliance. Now as a theatre professor and stage director at Providence College, our theatre department's play-selection committee was searching for plays to produce during our season dedicated to women in the theatre. As a member of the committee, I was tasked with proposing plays that would be a good fit for the theme and that offer something I would be interested in directing. I remembered that strange yet poignant play I read so many years ago, and decided to read it again and investigate if it might be a good vehicle for our students, remembering little more than the fact that it was written by a woman and featured an all-female-identifying cast of characters. As I began to dig into the text, I was enthralled by the way that Fornés crafted a plot that was driven by women who were confronting their issues, not hiding from them, in contrast to the women of Ibsen, Chekhov, and Williams, whose words surrounded [End Page 149] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Undergraduate Madelyn Rich (Emma) performs a monologue as other cast members look on...

The Language Question: Khoisan Linguicide and Epistemicide

ABSTRACT This paper sketches practical and speculative parameters of reversing the usage decline of Khoisan language(s) and ways of life by means of inclusive legislative interventions, political representation, economic empowerment and the popular realms through the mainstreaming of cultural aspects of southern Africa’s autochthonous communities. Its objective is to propose avenues, through identifiable international benchmarks, for a Khoisan revival and civilisational renaissance without resorting to reverse essentialism and romanticism that negates the complexity of Khoi and San traditions and the evolving dynamism of Khoi and San peoples.

Dynamo theories

These lecture notes are based on a tutorial given in 2017 at a plasma physics winter school in Les Houches. Their aim is to provide a self-contained graduate-student level introduction to the theory and modelling of the dynamo effect in turbulent fluids and plasmas, blended with a review of current research in the field. The primary focus is on the physical and mathematical concepts underlying different (turbulent) branches of dynamo theory, with some astrophysical, geophysical and experimental contexts disseminated throughout the document. The text begins with an introduction to the rationale, observational and historical roots of the subject, and to the basic concepts of magnetohydrodynamics relevant to dynamo theory. The next two sections discuss the fundamental phenomenological and mathematical aspects of (linear and nonlinear) small- and large-scale magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) dynamos. These sections are complemented by an overview of a selection of current active research topics in the field, including the numerical modelling of the geo- and solar dynamos, shear dynamos driven by turbulence with zero net helicity and MHD-instability-driven dynamos such as the magnetorotational dynamo. The difficult problem of a unified, self-consistent statistical treatment of small- and large-scale dynamos at large magnetic Reynolds numbers is also discussed throughout the text. Finally, an excursion is made into the relatively new but increasingly popular realm of magnetic-field generation in weakly collisional plasmas. A short discussion of the outlook and challenges for the future of the field concludes the presentation.

Advancing Feminism Online

Can online tools address gender bias in classics? Through two case studies, this article explores the use of crowd-sourcing in order to develop digital tools that amplify women and provide them with a firmer online identity. The first, Wikipedia.org, is already entrenched in the popular research realm, and the second, WOAH (Women of Ancient History), is currently being developed as a reference tool. Wikipedia.org is the most influential source of knowledge in the world, but it has a stubborn gender bias against women. This distortion is particularly evident in the field of classics, where prior to 2017 only 7% of biographies of classicists featured women. Here, ‘classics’ is an inclusive term, and is broadly conceived to include the field of Late Antiquity. This short article details how the Women's Classical Committee (UK)'s Wikipedia editing initiative, #WCCWiki, and the development of WOAH, have successfully increased the visibility of women online. Consequently, it offers a model to mobilize change with few physical or financial resources, but rather facilitated by digital tools and social media. Through digital feminist activism, there is the potential to reverse the gender skew of classicists online and in the public discourse, while also creating an inclusive space that is professional, proactive, and accessible to all.

Intimate Navigations, Refracted Perspectives

Intimate Navigations, Refracted Perspectives

"Release Your Wiggle": Big Freedia's Queer Bounce

This article examines the music and performances of Bounce artist Big Freedia as part of a queer Bounce diaspora. Drawing attention to diasporic traditions, Freedia’s music and performances reveal the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, geography, and class that converge in Bounce. These intersections are often obscured in mainstream imaginings of this music but her form works against dominant myths of Bounce as a local, hyper-masculine and hyper-heterosexual form. Underscoring the queer intersectionality of Bounce and its global influence, her performance mode complicates the ways New Orleans working-class black southernness has been represented, consumed, and reproduced in the popular realm. Freedia invites audiences to consider the dynamism of black southern working-class subjectivities. As a result, her music promotes inclusion as she teaches appropriate ways to consume the form and troubles tourist-oriented interactions with Bounce.

Big Social Network Data and Sustainable Economic Development

New information technologies have led to the rapid and effective growth of social networks. The amount of data produced by social networks has increased the value of the big data concept, which is one of the popular current phenomena. The immediate or unpredictable effects of a wide array of economic activities on large masses and the reactions to them can be measured by using social media platforms and big data methods. Thus, it would be extremely beneficial to analyze the harmful environmental and social impacts that are caused by unsustainable business applications. As social networks and big data are popular realms currently, their efficient use would be an important factor in sustainable economic development. Accurate analysis of people’s consumption habits and economic tendencies would provide significant advantages to companies. Moreover, unknown consumption factors that affect the economic preferences of individuals can be discovered and economic efficiency can be increased. This study shows that the numerous solution opportunities that are provided by social networks and big data have become significant tools in dynamic policy creation by companies and states, in solving problems related to women’s rights, the environment, and health.

Revisioning Buddhism as a Science of the Mind in a Secularized China: A Tibetan Perspective

Tibetan Buddhism is one of the fastest growing religions among Chinese in the twenty-first century. The transnational teaching activities of numerous Tibetan lamas attest to this religious trend in the popular realm of contemporary China. Unlike on their native soil, Tibetan lamas immersed in urban China encounter converts whose acceptance of Buddhism often rests upon a “scientific” assessment of Buddhism. Thus, the Buddhism-science dialogue stands out as a central theme in contemporary Sino-Tibetan Buddhist encounters. Based on the authors’ collaborative study of the Buddhism-science entanglement in this transnational Buddhist context, this article will illustrate that science signifies not merely the conventionally accepted system of knowledge, based on the modern, empirically-driven search for the understanding of the material world. Instead, it connotes a web of interconnected social meanings pertaining to Buddhist understanding, critique, and appropriation of this web. In this regard, the authors argue that simultaneously, science is identified as an integral part of the iconoclastic secularism in modern China subject to contemporary Buddhist critique, science is utilized as an instrument of Buddhist conversion, and science is reconceived as a neutral, open social space for knowledge making, in which an increasing number of Buddhist teachers persistently claim Buddhism as a science of its own.

Contested Governance of Wetlands in Bangalore

Urban commons such as water bodies are increasingly becoming part of various narratives, be it in the popular realm as well as academic. This is spurred on by increased instances of flooding in places like Bangalore and extreme pollution leading to dystopian sights of lakes on fire and towering sheets of foam. Contestation around these commons play out at various levels, be it at the local, involving land and claims around it; jurisdictional, between different government agencies and mind spaces of various groups interested in raising the flag on restoration

How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money. Bill Maurer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015, 176 pp. $19.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5999-9.

How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money. Bill Maurer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015, 176 pp. $19.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5999-9.

Sticky e/motional connections: young people, social media, and the re-orientation of affect

In this paper, I offer a provisional look at some of the ways that belonging, participation, and affective relations are being reconfigured through young people’s relationship to social media as an important site of popular culture in South Africa, where the increasing ubiquity of digital devices is clearly shifting the nature of everyday relationships that shape their individual and collective sense of self. Despite concerns about the digital divide, the reality is that most young people in South Africa are already accessing social media platforms via their cell phones. Therefore, it is no longer a question of mere access to technology (although in many places, access is still a key issue) but the quality of access. Exploring the everyday and popular realm of social media as a site of “emergent consciousness” for youth, I suggest that it is important to think about the relationship between two senses of “stickiness”—both when it comes to the economic entanglement of users, as well as the degree of their affective investment in social networks—when understanding social media as providing a platform for an “intimate public sphere,” a contested and contradictory terrain that can ultimately be both potentially dangerous and emancipatory.

For Love of Country

Ambelin Kwaymullina, an Aboriginal writer, illustrator, and assistant professor who comes from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, has most recently ventured into the popular realm of YA Dystopias with her Tribe trilogy: The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012), The Disappearance of Ember Crow (2013), and The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (2015). Although the Tribe series aligns with the ecological utopia and Bildungsroman, it is more importantly a “teaching story” whose strength resides in its use of the apocalypse and the centralizing of Country as collective tactics of survivance and cultural brokering relevant to the experiences of living in a (post)colonial world.

Ideological Extremity and Success in Primary Elections

Many cite the growing tendency of political parties to nominate ideologically extreme candidates in U.S. primary elections as a reason for increasing congressional polarization. However, a lack of quantitative data on candidate ideology makes this claim difficult to test. We propose a unique solution to this problem that exploits data from the increasingly popular realm of social media by estimating ideal points for candidates for the U.S. Senate based on the patterns of connections in their Twitter social network. We identify a latent ideological dimension from the matrix of following relations, which corresponds closely to roll call–based estimates for congressional officeholders. Controlling for other relevant factors, we find support for the hypothesis that ideological extremity is advantageous in party primaries.

Ensouling the Nation through Fiction: Liang Qichao’s Applied Buddhism

以小说赋魂予国家： 梁启超的应用佛学 摘要 梁启超的应用佛学在他对构建现代中国的政治想象和社会倡导中起到了重要的作用。本文以梁启超的政治小说为个案提出三个相互关联的论点。第一，梁启超在他倡导政治小说的过程中所表达的民族主义是一种源于欧洲的浪漫民族主义，但是在晚清民初的语境下被推动；第二，梁启超的应用佛学是当时汉传佛教世俗化的一部分，其目的并不像欧洲政教分离式的世俗化，而是致力于把佛教价值观普及到中国社会里；第三，梁启超的应用佛学应该被追认为当代左翼佛教的前驱之一。

Translating time: chronicle, prognostication, prophecy

The early modern period knew two kinds of writing about time: writing the past, and writing the future. Chronicles, as exemplified by the Nuremburg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel and his associates printed in 1493, might entail mobilizing the intellectual talents of a city's patrician elite in order to import Italian humanist historiography north of the Alps, and then from Latin into the vernacular. Astrological prognostications, of which thirty or more editions might be published in a given year, represent the meeting of scientific and popular discourse, while prophetic pamphlets belonged firmly to the popular realm. In this article, I demonstrate how, in each of these genres, translation was a creative rather than a derivative activity, one that drove development in the genre and brought forth printed works of new kinds. For the chronicle, translation created a history writing that was aware of its own print media context; for prognostications, translation created the characteristic form of the printed booklet still known as the Practica teüsch long after Latin prognostications were all but unknown; and for prophecies in print, translation was a constitutive part of their origin and transmission as texts: to become a prophecy, a text had to be translated from one medium, one era, one context, or one language into another.

Minireview: transgenerational epigenetic inheritance: focus on endocrine disrupting compounds.

The idea that what we eat, feel, and experience influences our physical and mental state and can be transmitted to our offspring and even to subsequent generations has been in the popular realm for a long time. In addition to classic gene mutations, we now recognize that some mechanisms for inheritance do not require changes in DNA. The field of epigenetics has provided a new appreciation for the variety of ways biological traits can be transmitted to subsequent generations. Thus, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance has emerged as a new area of research. We have four goals for this minireview. First, we describe the topic and some of the nomenclature used in the literature. Second, we explain the major epigenetic mechanisms implicated in transgenerational inheritance. Next, we examine some of the best examples of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, with an emphasis on those produced by exposing the parental generation to endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs). Finally, we discuss how whole-genome profiling approaches can be used to identify aberrant epigenomic features and gain insight into the mechanism of EDC-mediated transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Our goal is to educate readers about the range of possible epigenetic mechanisms that exist and encourage researchers to think broadly and apply multiple genomic and epigenomic technologies to their work.

Popular realms of memory in Japan: the case of Sakamoto Ryōma

Sakamoto Ryōma is said to have united the fiefs of Satsuma and Chōshū in their attempt to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate, which eventually led to the Meiji Restoration. He is one of the most popular historical figures in contemporary Japan. However, while the remembrance and commemoration of the darkest decades from the 1930s to the 1940s in Japanese history have been researched extensively in the West, cases such as Sakamoto have been mostly neglected. This paper examines Sakamoto’s current popularity and puts it into the context of Pierre Nora’s concept of “realms of memory.” Nora’s concept describes how national identity draws upon various memories and transforms them into interconnected points of reference. The analysis starts by scrutinizing on the many historical novels that have been written about Sakamoto as well as the historical TV drama Ryōma-den, produced and aired by public broadcaster NHK in 2010. Situating Sakamoto’s case in the overall picture of Japanese “realms of memory” reveals the political dimensions of memorizing him. Sakamoto has been cherished by conservatives and left-wing students alike. The paper concludes that Sakamoto and other heroes such as Saigō Takamori should be included into Western research on collective historical memory in Japan because they shed light on the complex entanglement of memory and politics in Japan.

Introduction

Introduction

The end of “re-colonization”: on Hong Kong, knowledge, and G.O.D

Hong Kong studies often argue that 1997—a key moment of globalization—marked not re-unification and an end of colonialism but a “re-colonization” at the hands of Beijing. This essay refutes this claim on several grounds and situates it in the context of global knowledge production about China. When we interrogate the historiographic and cultural studies claims for a re-colonization we see that this is more often announced than substantiated. The claim is intellectually problematic on legal, historical and popular opinion grounds. It moreover indicates a continuing contradiction dating from the colonial/Cold War era in how knowledge about China, and China–Hong Kong is produced. Such work does not engage mainland perspectives but rather tends to “other” or orientalize the P.R.C. Globalization has not altered this academic/knowledge imbalance. But this may be changing in the commercial and popular realms. This essay’s final section analyzes the emergence of a Hong Kong–P.R.C. hybrid identity as seen in the design work of G.O.D, a local chain that sells home-goods, clothes, and the like with an avowed emphasis on both local and P.R.C. culture (e.g. Mao era things). All of this taken together suggests an end to the claim of re-colonization. Hong Kong has moved on and is now part of China’s globalization; the realm of knowledge production will, one should think, eventually catch up.